Hassabis shortens AGI timeline to two to three years

36Kr · AI

Hassabis changes his tune: AGI could arrive in as soon as 2 to 3 years

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Google DeepMind's Hassabis shortened the AGI timeline to the next 2 to 3 years; his previous forecasts ranged from 5 to 10 years, to within 5 years, to 2030. He proposed using the "Einstein test" to judge whether AGI has arrived, that is, giving an AI only knowledge up to 1901 and seeing whether it can independently derive the theory Einstein published in 1905. The article also mentions that this summer he drafted a proposal for an industry-funded, federally regulated body to test frontier models before they are released.

The Paper

Hassabis shortens AGI forecast from "three to five years" to "two to three years"

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis compressed the timeline for AGI's arrival from "three to five years" earlier this year to "two to three years," and said the expectation is still moving earlier. He attributed part of his judgment to Isomorphic Labs: the company completed a $2.1 billion Series B funding round in May 2026 and plans to submit its first new drug clinical trial application before the end of 2026. Hassabis reiterated that AGI's primary value is accelerating scientific discovery, and argued that rushing to legislate before the technology is fully understood means "bad regulation is worse than no regulation."

the_decoder

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