Google DeepMind CEO Says AGI Is Coming Fast: ‘We Don’t Have Long to Prepare’

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis believes that artificial general intelligence is no longer a distant scientific goal, but one that will emerge in the very near future.

Speaking at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event last week, the AI ​​pioneer said he expects AGI, the point at which AI is able to perform a wide range of intellectual tasks at or beyond human levels, to emerge by the end of the decade.

“We call AGI this next version of truly general artificial intelligence,” Hassabis said. “I believe we’re only a few years away from that, maybe about 2030 plus or minus a year, which is actually amazing to think.”

Hassabis described the moment as the beginning of a “new human era.”

“As we look back on this time, I think maybe in 10 years we will realize that we were now at the foot of the singularity,” he said.

According to Hassabis, 2026 marked a turning point, where AI agents and capabilities for using tools became truly useful in people’s work and developers gained a clearer picture of the remaining steps needed to achieve AGI, while also arguing that preparing for its arrival can no longer be left to technologists alone.

“Society needs to hear that because we don’t have long to prepare for what that means. It will be extremely profound,” he said. “The future, in my opinion, is still to be written, but the next few years will be very crucial in terms of which direction that will go and what we collectively want that to look like.”

Hassabis’ comments come as the debate over how close the industry is to achieving AGI continues to grow.

Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that OpenAI knows how to build AGI “as we have traditionally understood it” and suggested that AI agents could join the workforce. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have also predicted that AGI-level systems could arrive within the next few years.

“I think we will reach AGI in 2026,” Musk said said in December during an interview with XPRIZE Foundation Executive Chairman Peter Diamandis. “I am convinced that AI will surpass the intelligence of all humans by 2030.”

Others argue that the milestone has already been reached and that current boundary models already meet the definition of AGI.

“I think we’re at the inflection point where we have AGI,” Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters previously said. Declutter. “I am completely convinced that this is general intelligence.”

Skeptics, however, point to evidence that current systems are still far from general human-level reasoning. In March, the ARC Prize Foundation released its ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, which tests whether AI systems can learn and adapt in unfamiliar environments. Leading models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI scored below 1%, while human participants achieved perfect scores.

However, the lack of a shared definition of what constitutes AGI also complicates the debate. Malo Bourgon, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, noted that competing definitions make it difficult to determine when the milestone has been reached.

“There are a lot of different definitions,” Malo Bourgon said Declutter. “When we start talking about it, is this system AGI? Is that system AGI? What exactly qualifies as AGI by what definition? I think that’s kind of hard to do.”

However, Hassabis believes the pace of technological progress is accelerating.

“Everything is going to change in the next 10 years, probably more than people think,” he said.