Deepmind CEO Hassabis says AGI will hit like ten industrial revolutions compressed into a single decade

Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis compares the arrival of AGI to ten times the industrial revolution in a tenth of the time. "I sometimes quantify AGI as 10 times the industrial revolution at 10 times the speed. So unfolding over a decade instead of a century," Hassabis says in the 20VC podcast. He sees a "very good chance of it being within the next 5 years," an assessment that hasn't changed since 2010, when co-founder Shane Legg predicted it would take 20 years: "I think we're pretty much on track."

Getting there still requires several major advances, including continuous learning, long-term planning, better memory architectures, and greater consistency. Hassabis describes current systems as "jagged intelligences," "really amazing at certain things when you pose the question in a certain way, but if you pose a question in a slightly different way they can still fail at quite elementary things." Scaling continues to deliver results, "although they're a bit less than they were at the start of all of this scaling."

Hassabis also points to a growing perception gap. "Today and in the next year things are a bit overhyped in AI," he says. But looking further out, "it's still very underappreciated how revolutionary this is going to be in the time scale of about 10 years."