Demis Hassabis says AGI is years away

Demis Hassabis said society has only a few years to prepare for AGI.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at Google I/O last week that humanity is in the “foothills of the singularity” and that the window to prepare for AGI may be just a few years.

What changed

Hassabis framed AGI as a near-term milestone, not a distant research goal. The message was delivered from Google’s own developer conference, putting the company’s top AI executive on record in front of the engineers building the products that will have to absorb those changes.

He did not attach a formal timeline for AGI arrival, but the wording was clear: society should treat the next few years as a prep period. That is a sharper stance than the more cautious public language many AI leaders use when discussing general-purpose systems.

• Speaker: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis
• Venue: Google’s developer conference, Google I/O
• Claim: humanity is in the “foothills of the singularity”
• Warning: society has only a few years to prepare for AGI

Why it matters

For developers, this kind of statement matters because it signals where Google expects product, safety, and infrastructure work to head next. If AGI is treated as a near-term planning problem, teams may face more pressure to build guardrails, evaluation methods, and deployment controls now rather than later.

For the market, the comment adds urgency to an already crowded race among frontier AI labs. It also gives investors and enterprise buyers another clue that major platform vendors are thinking about AI not just as a feature layer, but as a shift that could affect how software is built and used.

The open question is no longer whether AGI will stay theoretical for long, but how quickly companies can adapt if leaders like Hassabis are right about the timeline.