Google DeepMind CEO says these are the skills that will set humans apart from AI

Google Deep Mind CEO Demis Hassabis has been vocal about his belief that artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical type of AI that can perform tasks matching human cognition, is just a few years away from being achieved. During a recent interview at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Hassabis reaffirmed his prediction. “I believe that we’re only a few years away from that, maybe 2030, plus or minus a year, which is astounding to think, really,” Hassabis said. “I think that will be such an enormous transformative technology,” he added. “It’s gonna effectively be a new human era.” Ten years from now, Hassabis said he thinks “we’ll realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity,” referring to the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence and continually improves itself, beyond human control. There’s no consensus on when AGI will be reached, even among leaders in the AI space. Last year, Sam Altman wrote in a blog post that “humanity is close to building digital superintelligence,” referring to the hypothetical future stage after AGI, where AI’s intelligence level surpasses the smartest human minds. “We (the whole industry, not just OpenAI) are building a brain for the world,” Altman wrote in the post. In an essay published in 2024, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that powerful AI could be achieved as soon as late 2026. “In 2027, AI systems could be capable of tasks that take a person weeks,” wrote Anthropic’s cofounder Jack Clark and The Anthropic Institute’s lead Marina Favaro in a coauthored piece published last month.” Yann LeCun, Meta’s former VP & chief AI scientist, and a pioneer of convolutional neural networks—the visual processing technology behind facial recognition and autonomous vehicles—said the “concept of general intelligence is complete BS.” LeCun also believes that the current transformer-based large language models are not likely to achieve general or human-level intelligence that will