Deepmind founder Hassabis shortens AGI timeline from five to two to three years

Oct 21, 2026

Demis Hassabis, Google Deepmind founder and Nobel laureate in chemistry, now believes AGI could arrive within two to three years. He defines AGI as a system matching the full cognitive range of the human brain.

That timeline keeps shrinking. Earlier this year, he said three to five years. "It's going to happen soon. My estimate keeps moving closer to the present," he told the Wall Street Journal. His litmus test is the "Einstein test": Could a system trained only on pre-1901 knowledge reproduce Einstein's 1905 papers?

Hassabis has compared AGI's impact to "10 times the industrial revolution at 10 times the speed." Since stepping down from Google DeepMind, he's focused on Google's drug discovery AI spin-off Isomorphic Labs. On safety, he recently pitched an industry-funded oversight board under government control to vet models before release. Bad regulation, he warns, is worse than none.

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