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

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis believes 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 capable of performing a broad range of intellectual tasks at or beyond human levels, to emerge by the end of the decade.

“We’ve been calling AGI this next version of really general artificial intelligence,” Hassabis said. “I believe that we’re only a few years away from that, maybe like 2030 plus or minus a year, which is astounding to think, really.”

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

“When we look back at this time, I think that maybe 10 years from now, we’ll realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now,” he said.

According to Hassabis, 2026 marked a turning point, with AI agents and tool-use capabilities becoming genuinely useful in people’s work and giving developers a clearer view of the remaining steps needed to reach AGI, while also arguing that preparation 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’s going to be enormously profound,” he said. “The future, in my view, is still to be written, but these next few years are going to be very critical as to which way that will go and how we collectively want that to look like.”

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

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

“I think we’ll hit AGI in 2026,” Musk said in December during an interview with the executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis. “I’m confident by 2030, AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined.”

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

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

Skeptics, however, point to evidence that today’s systems remain far from human-level general 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. Machine Intelligence Research Institute CEO Malo Bourgon noted that competing definitions make it difficult to determine when the milestone has been reached.

“There’s a bunch of different definitions,” Malo Bourgon told Decrypt. “When we start to talk about, is this system AGI? Is that system AGI? What precisely qualifies as AGI by what definition? I think that’s kind of difficult to do.”

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

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