AGI Could Be Ready by 2030, Says Google DeepMind CEO

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says artificial general intelligence (AGI) is no longer a distant goal but one that could be operational in the near future.

Speaking at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event last week, the CEO said he expects AGI – a version of AI technology that is capable of performing a range of intellectual tasks at or beyond human levels – to emerge by 2030.

“We've been calling AGI this next version of really general artificial intelligence,” Demis 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.”

He added that this moment would mark 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,” Demis said.

A turning point for the AI industry

According to Demis, 2026 marked a turning point for AI.

He says agentic AI and tool-use capabilities have widely used and are more useful in people's work, giving developers a clearer view of the remaining steps needed to reach AGI. 

However, he also argued that preparation for its arrival can no longer be left to technology experts 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.”

Demis’s remarks come as the debate over how close the industry is to achieving AGI continues to gain traction.

Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed OpenAI had the tools necessary to build AGI and claimed AI agents could begin joining the workforce. Additionally, 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 a December interview with Peter Diamandis, Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation. “I'm confident by 2030, AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined.”

The definition of artificial general intelligence

Alternatively, others in the industry argue that the milestone has already been reached and current frontier models already meet the definition of AGI.

Eliza Labs Founder Shaw Walters says: “I think that we're at the inflection point where we have AGI. I completely believe that this is general intelligence.”

However, others in the industry are sceptical of this milestone, with many pointing to evidence that today’s agentic AI is not at a point where it is equal to human-level intelligence.

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.

Machine Intelligence Research Institute CEO Malo Bourgon argues that the lack of a shared definition of AGI makes it difficult to determine when the milestone has been reached.

“There’s a bunch of different definitions. 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,” Malo says.

Demis, however, told students at Stanford that he believes the pace of the technology is accelerating.

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