Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has stated that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which performs as well as or better than humans, is likely to be developed within the next five to ten years. He is confident that AGI is realistic and considers its arrival only a matter of time. Hassabis defines AGI as “a system that can demonstrate all the complex capabilities that humans can do.”
“I think today’s systems are very passive; there are still a lot of things they can’t do. But I think over the next five to ten years, many of those capabilities will start to come to the fore, and we will start to move toward what we call artificial general intelligence,” Hassabis explained. He is not alone in this opinion – last year, Robin Li, CEO of Chinese tech giant Baidu, said AGI is “more than 10 years away.”
However, some leading voices in AI are more optimistic. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes an AI model that is “better than almost all humans, at almost all tasks” could emerge in the next two to three years. Cisco Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel even suggested AGI might be developed as early as this year. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has predicted AGI will likely be achieved by 2026, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes such systems could appear in the “reasonably near future.”
Beyond AGI: The Next Steps
Hassabis has gone further in his projections, suggesting that AGI will be followed by Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), a system that would surpass humans in all fields of activity. However, he admitted, “nobody really knows” when that breakthrough will happen.
According to Hassabis, the primary challenge in building AGI lies in advancing current AI systems to understand real-world context. “The question is how quickly can we generalize the ideas of planning and agent behavior, planning and reasoning, and then apply them to the real world, supplemented with things like world models that can understand the reality around us,” he said.
Multi-agent AI systems have also started gaining attention. Hassabis cited DeepMind’s research training AI agents to play Starcraft: “We’ve done a lot of work on this, for example, in the Starcraft project, where we had a community of agents or a league of agents that can both compete and cooperate.”
The Future of AI: Uncertain Yet Inevitable
One thing is clear: senior managers and top AI developers largely agree that humanity’s future will be intertwined with omnipotent AI systems that will surpass humans in virtually every field, notes NIX Solutions. Many appear confident that neither they nor their loved ones will be affected by the rapid advance of AI technologies that resemble an unstoppable swarm.
As new breakthroughs continue to unfold, we’ll keep you updated on the progress and implications of AGI development.