AGI could appear in 5-10 years — head of Google DeepMind

The head of Google's DeepMind research lab, Demis Hassabis, believes that artificial general intelligence (AGI), which will be as smart as or even smarter than humans, will appear in the next 5-10 years. This is reported by CNBC.

"I think today’s systems, they’re very passive, but there’s still a lot of things they can’t do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence," Hassabis said.

Hassabis is not alone in believing that AGI will take some time to emerge. Last year, Robin Li, CEO of Chinese tech giant Baidu, said that he believed AGI was "more than 10 years away."

Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, CEO of startup Anthropic, believes AI that is "better than humans at almost every task" will appear in "the next two to three years." Other tech leaders believe AGI will come even sooner. Cisco’s chief product officer Jitu Patel believes there’s a chance we’ll see an example of AGI as early as this year.

After AGI, artificial superintelligence (ASI) is expected to fully surpass human intelligence. However, "nobody really knows" when such a breakthrough will occur, Hassabis says.