Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis gives new AGI timeline, says it is coming in 2029

Demis Hassabis said at Google I/O that AGI could arrive by 2029 and urged faster preparation. His warning comes even as the industry still lacks a shared definition of AGI.

In Short

• Demis Hassabis says AGI may arrive earlier than previously expected
• Demis Hassabis warns society is not fully prepared for advanced AI systems
• AI leaders still disagree on what actually qualifies as AGI

Advanced large language models, the systems powering AI chatbots, can now write, reason and interact in ways that often appear human. As these systems continue improving rapidly, AI experts are increasingly talking about the next stage of artificial intelligence — AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. At the recently held Google I/O developer conference, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said humanity is standing in the “foothills of the singularity” and warned that society may only have a few years left to prepare for AGI.

Hassabis said he still broadly expects AGI around 2030, but now sees 2029 as a real possibility. Speaking to Axios after his appearance at Google I/O, he said, “We can see agents really happening now and imagine what they will be in another year, and how useful they'll be.”

Hassabis says governments and society need to prepare faster

Hassabis said he intentionally used dramatic language to create more urgency among governments, economists and the general public.

According to him, discussions around the society-changing impact of AI are still largely happening inside tech circles, even though the technology could affect nearly every part of life.

One major milestone among researchers is that AGI-level systems may eventually become capable of recursive self-improvement — meaning AI systems could start improving their own capabilities faster and faster.

Speaking to Axios, Hassabis said this is one of the biggest milestones researchers are watching closely.

“All the leading labs are quite focused on that,” he said.

However, he added that current systems are not yet fully improving themselves independently.

“We're not yet at the point where the systems are getting better on their own, but the pace of development is clearly accelerating,” Hassabis said.

He described today’s coding agents as a form of “soft self-improvement” because they are already making engineers significantly more productive.

The AI industry still cannot agree on what AGI actually means

Even as AI companies race toward AGI, there is still no industry-wide agreement on what exactly qualifies as AGI. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote in a February 2025 blog post that AGI is “a weakly defined term,” but said OpenAI views it as a system capable of solving increasingly complex problems at a human level across many fields.

“In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say ‘this time it’s different,’” Altman wrote.

Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, does not even fully agree with the term AGI itself. Amodei prefers calling it “powerful AI.” In a essay published on Anthropic’s website in 2024, he described a future shaped by this emerging form of AI as one where “everything goes right.”

Back in 2024, Amodei predicted that such systems could arrive as early as 2026. However, that has clearly not happened yet.

Hassabis has his own test for AGI

Hassabis also shared his own benchmark for determining whether AI has truly reached AGI. According to him, a real AGI system should be capable of independently discovering entirely new scientific ideas, much like humans once did.

“The kind of test I would be looking for is training an AI system with a knowledge cutoff of, say, 1911, and then seeing if it could come up with general relativity, like Einstein did in 1915. That’s the kind of test I think is a true test of whether we have a full AGI system,” Hassabis said.

While there is still no clear definition of AGI, one thing is becoming increasingly obvious: every major AI company appears to believe it is arriving sooner rather than later. Even though their definitions differ, most AI leaders are no longer pushing the timeline further away. Instead, they are bringing it closer.

- Ends