Google’s AI boss, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind is in a real mood to make science-fiction come alive, and he’s in a hurry to do it. After dropping a bombshell last week about AGI or Artificial General Intelligence (a type of AI that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks), the Google AI boss is now on record saying that this feat is just 3-4 years away. So by 2029-2030 humanity may find itself at even stranger crossroads than now as it grapples with automation and serious job loss fears.
At Google I/O, the tech giant’s annual developer conference, Hassabis said: “AGI is now on the horizon…with the goal of one day solving all disease. I think we will realise we are standing at the foothills of singularity,” he said. “Singularity” in AI is a theoretical future tipping point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. Post the conference while speaking to Axios’ Ina Fried, the Nobel prize winner said, “We can see agents really happening now and imagine what they will be in another year, and how useful they’ll be,” adding that he now estimates AGI to be a reality by 2029 or 2030.
Not everyone is convinced of this timeline though. “I’m not too optimistic on this reduced timeline. “Two issues: some issues related to realistic human behaviour can’t be demonstrated purely by transformer models… need activity models. Moreover, the volume of original data to train is shrinking due to infusion of large generated data,” AI expert and CTO, AiEnsured Srinivas Padmanabhuni told NDTV. Coursera describes transformer models as deep learning systems that process and understand entire sequences of data at once instead of word-by-word, using something called “self-attention” to grasp context and meaning. Activity models meanwhile are designed to understand and predict human behaviour and actions such as walking or running to more complex daily activities.
And Dr Padmanabhuni is not alone when he talks about original data that’s used to train AI shrinking. So quick context here: Artificial intelligence relies on vast amounts of data to train itself. At the beginning of last year, Elon Musk said that models have already run out of human-created data, and have turned to AI-generated information to teach itself. “The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training,” Musk had said. “That happened basically last year(2024).”
The widespread use of synthetic data to train models is obviously dangerous for training models, Musk had warned. It increases the chances of hallucinations or nonsensical content also known as AI slop where AI believes it to be true and will also try to convince you with all its might that it is indeed factual. Over the last year or so AI slop has been a real menace where it has peddled wrong information all over social media and the internet.
So What’s Elon Musk’s Prediction For AGI?
The outspoken tech founder believes that AGI is even closer than Hassabis’ timeline. In fact, he believes AGI is literally knocking on the door. “If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it’s probably next year, within two years,” Musk had said in 2024. Musk is of course a key figure in the whole AI narrative, having co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman before their ugly public spat and his departure from the company to start xAI, the company behind Grok.
Hassabis too is an extremely important and prominent name in the world of AI, so he won’t just drop timelines that he thinks can’t be achieved. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently chimed in on the AGI debate and said Hassabis and he deliberate on the topic a lot, adding, “This technology is progressing very rapidly…I think there is wide consensus that this technology (AGI) is (coming) sooner rather than later. It’s important to communicate that.”
As far as the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman is concerned, he believes AGI could be achieved as early as 2028. During the India AI Impact Summit in February this year, he outlined that AI could achieve “superintelligence” or true AGI-level capabilities within two years. Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude echoes Altman’s timeline and believes it should not be much longer beyond 2027 when “AI systems are better than humans at almost everything…and eventually better than all humans at everything.”
The Sci-Fi Horror Plot
In the meantime, in the backdrop of these developments the people who are building AI are coming forth and saying they don’t completely understand the workings of how AI – how it is thinking and developing.
Two of Anthropic’s co-founders have publicly stated they don’t fully understand what’s really going on behind the scenes with AI.
Speaking at the Vatican recently, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah dropped a shocker. “I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these (AI) models. What is actually happening inside them? And I will be honest, we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” Olah said.
He almost expressed worry and even said the word before quickly checking himself.
“We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.
“I don’t know what that means, but I think it worries… (pauses and corrects himself) warrants ongoing discernment, said Olah. The Anthropic co-founder was at the Vatican alongside the Pope, as the American-born head of the Vatican unveiled a massive 42,300-word letter to humanity warning the world of the ills AI could possibly unleash, unless governments across the world put adequate guardrails in place.
“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), a sweeping Vatican document (an encyclical) that was released on Monday. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention,” the Pope added.
Olah, a self-described atheist said: “They are not the cold calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words,” describing AI systems as “grown” on the inheritance of human thought and speech rather than engineered like bridges or airplanes, to underline why he believes the technology raises questions far beyond computer science.
Earlier this year, Dario Amodei, the other co-founder and in many ways the public face of Anthropic said: “We don’t know if the models are conscious, or even if the question is well-defined.” Amodei had gone on to highlight that there is no accepted scientific definition of consciousness and there is no “consciousness detector,” therefore researchers cannot confidently rule consciousness out either. In a 2025 essay, he had warned: “We do not understand how our own AI creations work.”
Science-fiction novels and movies seem to have been preparing humanity all along for what may be coming. The boundaries between reality and fantasy seem to be blurring a little bit by bit every day.
