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- Humanity is standing “on the foothills of the singularity,” Demis Hassabis said at I/O on Tuesday.
- The DeepMind CEO’s remark stunned the audience. Hassabis shared on Wednesday why he felt that way.
- Building video games late at night with AI convinced Hassabis that humanity is entering a new era.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis laid out why he thinks the singularity, a major turning point in AI, is near.
The singularity is near because of the rise of powerful AI agents that build things for people, Hassabis said in an interview with Axios cofounder Mike Allen on Wednesday at Google’s flagship I/O developer conference. The singularity refers to a hypothetical point when AI outpaces human intelligence and begins improving itself.
As an example, Hassabis said he’s been using AI to build mini video games late at night — tasks that would have taken many months in the past.
“This year, with the agentic systems that we’re all seeing and using, I think we can start feeling it now,” he said.
Hassabis added that he thinks artificial general intelligence, or AGI, when machines are about as intelligent as humans, will arrive as soon as 2030.
Hassabis said the impact of AI is still underestimated, declaring that it will be 100 times as impactful as the Industrial Revolution.
The DeepMind chief doesn’t think machines will take over the world, unlike some in Silicon Valley. While AI poses some risks, he said humans will harness the technology to solve many problems, especially in science and healthcare.
“I call myself a cautious optimist,” he said.
Hassabis also addressed the singularity on Tuesday at the I/O conference.
“When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity,” Hassabis said, to gasps in the audience.
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