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Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis: AI's Next Breakthroughs, AGI Timeline, Google's AI Glasses Bet

34m 7s

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis: AI's Next Breakthroughs, AGI Timeline, Google's AI Glasses Bet

In this interview, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis discusses the path to AGI, addressing skepticism about AI progress. He asserts that internal confidence never wavered, as improvements continue through pre-training, post-training, and thinking paradigms. However, Hassabis believes one or two major breakthroughs—such as continual learning, better memory, and long-term reasoning—are likely needed for AGI, which he defines as a system capable of all human cognitive abilities, including high creativity and physical intelligence. He dismisses the notion that current systems are close to AGI, citing their inability to invent new theories or art genres like Einstein or Picasso. Hassabis highlights hybrid systems combining neural networks with symbolic methods as promising, and sees world models from video generation as essential for planning and robotics. On products, he reveals Google is developing smart glasses for a hands-free AI assistant, with prototypes expected by summer, leveraging partnerships with Warby Parker and Samsung. He emphasizes that trust is paramount for AI assistants, clarifying that Google has no current plans to introduce ads in Gemini, despite industry speculation. Hassabis also praises coding advancements like vibe coding, which empowers creatives, and notes Google’s focus on both scaling current paradigms and pursuing novel architectures. Overall, he balances optimism about near-term progress with caution about the remaining challenges to achieving true AGI.

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English
Google DeepMind CEO, Demisis Abyss, joins us to talk about the path from here to AGI. When Google's AI glasses are coming, and whether the paste of AI progress can keep up at this rate, that's coming up right after this. Welcome to a special edition of Big Technology Podcast from Davos. I'm Alex Cantruz, and I'm joined today by a special guest, Demisis Abyss, the CEO of Google DeepMind Demis. Welcome back to the show. Here go, there were real questions about whether AI progress was tailing off. It was in fashion to ask whether LLMs were going to hit a wall. And those questions seem like they've been said, "Oh, there's been a tremendous amount of progress over the past year." Can you tell us what specifically has happened that's gotten the AI industry from that moment of question last year to the point that it is today? Well, for us internally, we were never questioning that, just to be clear. I think we've always been seeing great improvements. So we were a bit puzzled by why there was this question in the air. I mean, some of it was to do, we were all worried about data running out. And there is some truth in that as all the data had been used, can we create synthetic data that's going to be useful to learn from? But actually, it turns out you can ring more juice out of the existing architectures and data. There was plenty of room, I think, and we're still seeing that in both the pre-training, the post-training and the thinking paradigms and also the way that they all kind of fit together. So I think there's still plenty of headroom there, just with the techniques we already know about and tweaking and innovating on top of that. All right. Here's what a skeptic would say. Yeah. That there have been a lot of tricks that have been put on top of LLMs. I hear often about scaffolding and orchestration and AI that can use a tool to search the web, but it won't remember what it learns. As soon as you close that session, it forgets. Is that just a limitation of the large language model paradigm? Well, look, I think there is, and I'm definitely a subscriber to the idea that maybe we need one or two more big breakthroughs before we'll get to AGI. And I think there are along the lines of things like continual learning, better memory, longer context windows or perhaps more efficient context windows would be the right way to say it. So don't store everything, just store the important things. That would be a lot more efficient. That's what the brain does. And better long term reasoning and planning. Now, it remains to be seen whether just sort of scaling up existing ideas and technologies will be enough to do that. Or we need one or two more really big insightful innovations. I'm probably, if you were to push me, I would be in the latter camp. I think no matter what camp you're in, we're going to need large foundation models as the key component of the final AGI systems of that I'm sure. So I'm not a subscriber to someone like Jan LeCoon who thinks, you know, that gets sort of a some kind of dead end. I think the only debate in my mind is are they a key component or the only component? So I think it's between those two options. And for me, this is one advantage we have of having such a deep and rich research bench. We can go after both of those things at maximum with maximum force. Both scaling up the current paradigms and ideas. And when I say scaling up that also involves innovation, by the way, pre-training, especially I think we're very strong on. And then really new blue sky ideas for new architectures and things, you know, the kinds of things we've invented over the last 10 years as Google and DeepMind, you know, of course, including transformers. Can something with a lot of hard-coded stuff ever be considered AGI? No, I think, well, depends what you mean by a lot. I think that I'm very interested in hybrid systems as what I would call them or neuro symbolics. Sometimes people could call them, you know, alpha-fold, alpha-go or examples of that. So some of our most important work combines neural networks and deep learning with things like Monte Carlo research. So I think that could be possible. And there's some very interesting work we're doing, using the LLMs with things like evolutionary methods, alpha-evolve, to actually go and discover new knowledge. You may need something beyond what the existing methods do. But I think learning is a critical part of a gen of AGI. It's actually almost a defining feature. When we say general, we mean general learning. Can it learn new knowledge and can it learn across any domain? That's the general part. So for me, learning is synonymous with intelligence and always has been. Okay, so if learning is synonymous with intelligence, and these models still don't have the ability to continually learn, like I said earlier, it has goldfish brain. It can search the internet and it can be like, I figured this out. Yeah, but it doesn't change the model. It's just, we'll forget it after the session. Do you have a theory as to how the continual learning problem can be solved? And do you want to share it with us all? I can give you some clues. We are working very hard on it. We've done some work on, I think the best work on this in the past with things like alpha-0, that learn from scratch, versions of alpha-go, alpha-go-0, also learned on top of the knowledge it already had. So we've done it in much narrower domains. Games are obviously a lot easier than the messy real world. So it remains to be seen if those kinds of techniques will really scale and generalize to the real world and actual real world problems. But at least the methods we know can do some pretty impressive things. And so now the question is, can we blend that at least in my mind with these big foundation models? And so of course the foundation models are learning during training, but we would love them to learn out in the world. And including things like personalization, I think that's going to happen. And I feel like that's a critical part of building a great assistant is that it understands you. And it works for you. It's a technology that works for you. And we've released our first versions of that just last week. Personal intelligence is the sort of first baby steps towards that. But I think to have it, you want to do it more than just having your data in the context window. That's, you want to have something a bit deeper than that, which is, as you say, actually changes the model over time. That's what ideally you would have. And that technique has not been cracked here. We've brought up AGI a couple times. So let me put this to you because I was speaking with Sam Altman towards the end of the year. And I asked him, I was like, you seem to be saying two things. We're not at AGI yet. But every time he talks about what GPT models can do, it seems like it fits his definition. And he said that AGI is underdefined. What he wishes everybody could agree to was that we've sort of waged by AGI and we move towards super intelligence. I agree with that. I'm sure he does wish that. But it's, no, absolutely not. I don't think AGI should be sort of turned into a marketing term or for commercial gain. I think there is always been a scientific definition of that. My definition of that is a system that can exhibit all the cognitive capabilities humans can. And I mean all. So that means the highest levels of human creativity that we always celebrate, the scientists and the artists that we admire. So it means not just solving a math equation or a conjecture, but coming up with a breakthrough conjecture. That's much harder. Not solving something in physics or some bit of chemistry, some problem, even like alpha folds, protein folding, but actually coming up with a new theory of physics, something like Einstein did with general relativity. Can a system come up with that? Because of course we can do that. The smartest humans with our human brain architecture has been able to do that in history. And the same on the art side, not just create a pastiche of what's known, but actually be Picasso or Mozart and create a completely new genre of art that we'd never seen before. Right? And today's systems, in my opinion, are nowhere near that. Doesn't matter how many, you know, erders problems you solve, which for some reason, you know, I mean, you know, it's good that we're doing those things. But I think it's far, far from what, you know, true invention or someone like a Raminujan would have been able to do. And you need to have a system that can potentially do that across all these domains. And then on top of that, I had added in physical intelligence, because of course, you know, we can play sports and control our bodies and to amazing levels, the elite sports people that are walking around, you know, here today in Davos. And we're still way off of that on robotics as another example. So I think an age-to-eye system would have to be able to do all of those things, to really fulfill the original sort of goal of the AI field. And I think, you know, we're five to 10 years away from that. I think the argument would be that if something can do all those things, it would be considered superintelligence, but you think age-to-eye is a good time. No, of course not, because those individual humans could, we can come up with new theories, the Einstein-dead, Feynman-dead, all the greats that more my scientific heroes, they were able to do that. It's rare, but it's possible with the human brain architecture. So superintelligence is another concept that's worth talking about, but that would be things that can really go beyond what human intelligence can do. We can't think in 14 dimensions or, you know, plug in whether satellites into our brains, not yet anyway. But, and so that, those are truly beyond human or superhuman. And that, you know, that's a whole nother debate to have, but once we get to AI. I was listening to you recently and something you said really surprised me. You were asked on the Google Deep Mind podcast, which is great, listen, if you have a system today that is close to AGI, I thought it might be Gemini 3. You named Nano-Banana. Yes, the image generation. Yes. What? Well, you know, sometimes you have to have these fun. names and have fun with those. But how is the image generator close to AGI? Oh, well, of course. Look, let's take image generators, but also let's talk about our video generator, VO, which is the state of the art and video generation. I think that's even more interesting in from an AGI perspective. You can think of a video model that can generate you 10 seconds, 20 seconds of a realistic scene. It's sort of a model of the physical world. Intuitive physics would sometimes call it in physics land. And it's sort of intuitively understood how liquids and objects behave in the world. And that's obviously one way to exhibit understanding is to be able to generate it, at least to the human eye being accurate enough to be satisfying to the human eye. Obviously, it's not completely accurate from a physics point of view. And we're getting-- we're going to improve that. But it's steps towards having this idea of a world model, a system that can understand the world, and the mechanics and the causality of the world. And of course, that would be, I think, essential for AGI, because that would allow the system to plan, long-term plan, in the real world. Over, perhaps, very long time horizons, which, of course, we as humans can do. I'll spend four years getting a degree so that I have more qualifications, so that in 10 years, I'll have a better job. These are very long-term plans that we all do quite effortlessly. And at the moment, without these systems, we still don't know how to do. We can do short-term plans over one time scale. But I think you need these kind of world models. And I think you imagine, robotics-- that's exactly what you want for robotics-- is robots planning in the real world, being able to imagine many trajectories from the current situation they're in, in order to complete some task. That's exactly what you'd want. And then finally, from our point of view, and why we worked with Gemini as being multimodal from the beginning, able to deal with video image, and eventually converge that all into one model. That's our plan is that it'll be very useful for a universal assistance as well. So let's talk product a little bit. I watched the documentary The Thinking Game, along with 300 million other people. There was something kind of interesting that happened there. Throughout the documentary, yourself and some colleagues kept pointing your phone at things and asking an assistant alpha what was going on. And I was yelling at the computer as I usually do. And said, this guy needs glasses. He needs smart glasses to be able to do it. The phone is the wrong form factor. What is your vision for AI glasses? And when is the rollout happening? I think you're exactly right. And that was our conclusion. It's very obvious when you sort of dog food these things. And internally, as you saw from the film, we were holding up your phone to get it to tell you about the real world. And it's amazing at works. But it's clearly not the right form factor for a lot of things you want to do. Cooking or roaming around a city and asking for directions or recommendations. Or even helping the partially sighted. There's a huge, I think, use case there to help with those types of situations. And for that, I think you need something that's hands-free. And the obvious thing is, for those of us anyway, they're wear glasses. Like me is to put it on glasses. But there may well be other devices too. I'm not sure that glasses is the final form factor. But it's definitely-- it's obviously a clear, next form factor. And of course, at Google and an alphabet, we have a long history of glasses. And maybe we'll a bit too early in the past. But I think the-- my analysis of it and talking to the people working on that project was a couple of things. That the form factor was a bit too chunky and clunky in the battery life. And these kind of things, which are now more or less solved. But I think the thing it was missing was a killer app. And I think the killer app is universal digital assistant. That's with you, helping you in your everyday life. And they're available to you on any surface, on your computer, on your browser, on your phone, but also on devices like glasses when you're walking around the city. And I think it needs to be kind of seamless. And each of those contexts, among the stands, each of those contexts, around you. And I think we're close now, especially with Gemini 3, I feel we finally got AI that is maybe powerful enough to make that a reality. And it's one of the most exciting projects we're working on, I would say. And it's one of the things I'm personally working on is making smart glasses really work. And we hope to-- we've done some great partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster and Samsung to build these next generation glasses. And you should start seeing that maybe by the summer. Yeah, Warby Parker did have a filing that said that these glasses are coming out pretty soon this year. Yeah, and the prototype design. It depends how-- we're in prototype phase. It depends how quickly that advances. But I think it's going to happen very soon. And I think it will be a new category defining technology. Given your personal involvement, is it safe to say that this is a pretty important initiative? Yeah, it's one-- well, yes. But I mean, I like to-- it's not just as important. Obviously, I like spending my own time on important things. But I like to push the most cutting edge thing. And that's often the hardest thing. And picking into rim goals and giving confidence to the team. And also just sort of understanding if the timing's right. And over the years, I've been doing this the many-- the decades now. I've got quite good at doing that. So I try to be at the most cutting edge parts of-- I feel like I can make the most difference there. So things like glasses, robotics, some spending time on and world models. Right. OK, so timing's right for glasses. Let's talk about ads. Sure. It's the timing right for ads. Let me set it. Yes. OK. There's been some news that Gemini might include ads. There's been some news that some of your competitors might include ads. The funniest thing I saw about that on social media was someone who said, these people are nowhere close to AGI. If it's not going to be this world disrupting technology, if the business model is advertising. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I think those are tells on-- I think action speaks louder than words, going back to the original conversation we were having with Sam and others claiming AGI's around the corner. Why would you bother with ads then? So that is, I think, a reasonable question to ask. But I think-- look, from our point of view, we have no plans at the moment to do ads. I'm thinking of you talking about the Gemini app, right, specifically. I think we are going-- obviously, we're going to watch very carefully what the outcome of what Chattu Petit is saying they're going to do. I think it has to be handled very carefully, because the dichotomy I see is that if you want an assistant that works for you, what is the most important thing? Trust. OK. So trust and security and privacy, because you want to share potentially your life with that assistant, then you want to be confident that it's working on your behalf and with your best interests. And so you've got to be careful. I think there are ways one could do it, but you'll be careful that advertising model doesn't bleed into that and confuse the user as to what is this assistant recommending you. And I think that's going to be an interesting challenge in that space. And that's what's not to do. And Sue Dhran and Aresan Erning's call said, there are some ideas within Google of the right way to approach this. Sure. How do you approach advertising model? Well, we're still brainstorming that. But I think it's-- I think there are other, so very interesting ways when you think about glasses, devices, there are other revenue models out there. So it's going to be interesting to see. I don't think we've made any strong conclusions on that, but it's an area that needs very careful thought. Just to get a definitive answer from you, I think you've given it, but I'm just going to do one more time. I read before we met, Google has told advertisers in recent days from last year that it plans to bring ads to its AI chatbot, Gemini, in 2026. Nope, we have no current plans. That's what I can say. All right, that's pretty good. Yep. All right, let's just keep going through some of your competitors, anthropocode. Cloud code. Yeah, Cloud code and Cloud code work have caused a tremendous amount of buzz. It is amazing to see what some people have done. I saw a post from the next Amazon executive who said that he built a custom CRM in a weekend, or actually a day and a half. That's called a weekend. What do you think about it? And do you plan to have an answer to it? It's very exciting. And I think the QDOS to soundthrob, I think they built a very good model there with Cloud code. We're very happy with the current coding capabilities of Gemini 3. It's very good at certain things like front-end work. I've been using it over the Christmas to prototype games. So it's amazing. It's getting me back into programming. I love the whole vibe coding wave that's happening. I think it will open up the whole productivity space to designers, creatives, artists, that maybe would have had to work with teams about access to teams of programmers. Now they can probably do a lot more just on their own. I think that's going to be amazing once that's sort of out in the world in a more general way to create lots of new creative opportunities. We're working on-- we're very happy with our work on code. We've got more to do there. We've just released anti-gravity our own IDE, which is very, very popular. We can't actually serve all the demand that we're seeing there. And we're pushing very hard on coding and tool use performance of Gemini. But it's one thing that I think Anthropic have fully focused on. They don't make image models, multimodal models, world models. they just do. coding and language models, and they're very, very good at that. And we're pleased to be partnering on that on the one hand, and also it gives us something to push for to improve with our own models. >> Let's just talk broadly about the AI industry business. I have a theory for how this could all fall apart, and I want to run it by you. So it's three step, a three step process. The first is that large language model training runs produce limited returns. The second is that there are flash models like Gemini Flash that run AI computing as cheap as search. And then step three is that the massive infrastructure commitments that have been made become somewhat useless, given those two factors. And there is a cascading collapse that happens. Is that a legitimate worry? >> I think it's a plausible possible scenario. I don't think it's the likely one, in my opinion. I mean, in my mind, there's no doubt. AI has gone already proved that enough, I would say, and our work, I think, in things like science and alpha fold and drug discovery that it's here to stay. It's not like tomorrow, like, oh, we found that AI doesn't work. We've gone way, we've blasted way past that. So I think that's, it's clearly going to be the most transformers technology in human history. There's maybe a question mark about timelines. Is it two years or five years? I mean, either way, it's very soon for something that's transformative. And I think we're still in the nascent era of actually figuring out how to make use of it and deploy it. Because the technology is improving so fast, I think there's a huge capability overhang, actually, of what even today's models can do that maybe even us as building those things don't fully know. So I think there's just a vast amount of product opportunities that we see. And I think we're, as Google only just started to scratch the surface now of actually natively sort of plugging these things in to our amazing, existing products, let alone building the new ones. AI inbox, we've just started trialing. I mean, who wants to do email admin? I mean, we all love that to just go away. That's my number one pain point for my work, King Day. And there's so many examples like that, just waiting to be addressed, I think, agents in browsers, helping out with YouTube. Obviously, we're now powering search with it. So I think there's enormous opportunities. And if you're talking about the AI bubble, if that's the question-- I was trying to know that that's the AI bubble. I think it's fine. I mean, it seems like that's the question. I'm very happy to answer it. Because I think, look, my view is it's not binary. Are we in a bubble, not in a bubble? I think parts of the AI industry probably are. And other parts, I think, it remains to be seen. So I think some of the things are-- when you see seed rounds of tens of billions of dollars of companies that basically have no product or research, it's just some people coming together. That seems a bit unsustainable to me in a normal market, bit frothy. On the other hand, we're businesses like us. We have massive underlying businesses and products that it's very obvious how AI would increase the efficiency or the productivity of using those products. And then it remains to be seen how popular the monetization of these new AI native products, like chatbots, glasses, all of these things, we'll have to see. I think there will be enormous markets, but they're yet to be proven out. But from my perspective, running Google DeepMind is my job is to make sure that whatever happens with an AI bubble with it, if it bursts or if there isn't one, and it continues, we win either way. And I think we're incredibly well positioned as Alphabet in either case, doubling down on existing businesses in the one case or being at the forefront and the front here in the bull case. Going back to thinking game, speaking of the way that this will impact the economy, I started to feel bad for the opponents of your technology. Lisee Dahl demoralized. Sure. This guy, Manah, who played Starcraft beat your bot, but realized that it's basically over for humans versus machines. Now we're all up against this in some way as this stuff makes its way into knowledge work. I thought you were meaning our AI competitors. They're my my K-Wid. I don't feel sad about that. Sorry. And let's progress of AI. I mean the gamers. Yeah. Yeah. You made me feel bad for gamers. But I want to ask about this. We're going to have the same situation with knowledge work that these models that performed admirably against the world's best Starcraft and Go players are now starting to do our work. And are we going to end up in the same position? Well, let me give you a moment. You brought up games as an example. Let's look at what's happening games. So chess, we've had chess computers that are better since I was a teenager than Gary Kasparov in the '90s. They weren't general AI systems, but they were deep blue. Chess is more popular than ever. No one's interested in seeing computers playing computers. We're interested in Magnus Carlson playing the other top chess players in the world. Interestingly in Go, the best South Go player in the world is a South Korean. And he was about 15, I think, when Alpha Go match happened. He's in his mid-20s now. And he's by far the strongest player there's ever been by the Elo ratings, because he's learned natively young enough. He's the first generation you could say that's learned with Alpha Go knowledge in the knowledge pool. And he may actually be stronger than Alpha Go was back then. So I think-- and we will still enjoy Starcraft and all the other computer games. We enjoy human endeavor. I think it's a bit more-- it's a bit similar to, like, we still love the 100 meters Olympic race, even though we have vehicles that can go way faster than you say in bold. But we don't-- that's a different thing. And so I think we have infinite capacity to adapt and evolve with our technologies. Why is that? Because we are general intelligences. That's the thing about it. We are AGI systems. We are obviously not artificial. We're general systems. And we are capable of inventing science. And we're tool making animals. That's what separates us humans from the other animals is we're able to make tools all around modern civilization, including computers. And of course, AI, being the ultimate expression of computers. That all has come from our human minds, which were evolved for hunter gathering lifestyle. So it's kind of amazing. And it shows how general we are that we're able to get to the modern civilization we see around us then. We're talking about things like AI and science and physics and all these things. And I think we'll adapt again. But there is an important question actually, beyond the economics one about jobs and those things is purpose and meaning. Because we all get a lot of our purpose and meaning from the jobs we do. I certainly do from the science I do. So how does what happens when a lot of that is automated? I think that's why I've been calling for-- I think we knew new great philosophers, actually. And it will be a change to the human condition. But I don't think it necessarily has to be worse. I think it's like the Industrial Revolution, maybe 10X of that. But we'll have to adapt again. And I think we'll find new meaning and things. And we do a lot of things already today that are not just for economic gain-- art, extreme sports, expolio exploration, many of these things. And maybe we'll have much more sophisticated esoteric versions of those things in the future. OK, two minutes left. I have two questions. I don't know if we're going to get to both of them. Let me ask the one that I want to know the answer most about. In a recent interview, you said that you have a theory that information is the most fundamental unit of the universe-- energy, not matter, information. Yeah. How? Well, look, I think if you look at energy-- I mean, I don't know if we'll ever cover this in two minutes-- but in energy-- I'm not going to love this. --in energy, energy, energy, and matter. You can definitely-- I think a lot of people sort of think of them as isomorphic with information. But I think information is really the right way to understand the universe. So we think of biology and living systems. We're information systems that are resisting entropy. We're trying to retain our structure, retain our information in the face of a randomness that's happening around us. And I think you can look at that in a larger physics scale. So almost not just biology, but things like mountain, mountains, and planets, and asteroids, they've all been subject to some kind of selection pressure, not Darwinian evolution, but some kind of external pressure. And the fact that they've been stable over a long amount of time means that that information is kind of stable and meaningful. So I think one could view the world in terms of its complexity, information complexity. And I think a lot of what we're doing with our-- the reason I'm thinking about all of that is because of things like alpha-go and alpha-fold, especially alpha-fold, where we solve all the protein structures that are kind of known to science. And how we done that will-- because only a certain number of those in the kind of almost infinite possibilities of protein structures are stable. And those are the ones you've got to find. So you've got to understand that topology, that information topology, and follow it. And then suddenly, these problems that seem to be intractable, because how can you find the needle in the haystack actually become very tractable if you understand the energy landscape or the information landscape around that. And that's how I think eventually we'll solve most diseases, come up with new drugs, new materials, new superconductors, with the help of AI helping us navigate that information landscape. Dennis, before we go, I just want to wrap with this. Well, maybe quickly this first one and then a big question at the end. In the thinking game, speaking of health and AI, there's this moment where there's a discussion in the lab about whether to release results of alpha-fold and you kind of sit there adamantly and you're like why are we going through a process? release it, release it now. Talk a little bit about the lesson from there. Yeah, well look, we started Alpha Fold to crack a unbelievably tough scientific challenge, 50-year-grand challenge of protein folding and protein structure prediction. And the reason we worked on that and the reason we've put so much effort into it is we sort of thought there is a root node problem. If we could solve it and put that out in the world, it could be, it could do an amazing untold impact on things like human health and understanding biology. But we as a team, no matter how talented or hard-hired hard-working we are, we would only be able to scratch a small tiny amount of that potential on our own. It's clear. So in that case, and in this case, it was obviously the right thing to do to maximize the benefit to the world here, to put it out there, to the scientific, massive scientific community, to build on top of and use Alpha Fold and it's been incredibly gratifying to see, you know, three million researchers around the world use it in their important research. I think in future, almost every single drug that's discovered from now on will probably have used Alpha Fold at some point in that process, which is, you know, amazing for us. And, you know, really, this is what we do, all the work we do for. I also read that moment, you tell me from wrong, is something of a metaphor, small, passionate AI division kind of yelling in a big company, get this out, cut the red tape. Yeah, potentially. But look, I mean, we've had amazing support from the beginning from Google, the reason that we, you know, we joined forces, we Google back in 2014 is, Google itself is a scientific research engineering technical led company always has been and has that at its core. And that's why, you know, I think that we have the scientific method and the scientific approach that thoughtful approach, that rigorous approach in everything we do. So of course, they're going to love something like Alpha Fold. Okay, here's the big question at the end. You built Alpha Go, trained the computer to play Go on human knowledge. And then once it mastered the human level playing, you kind of like let it loose with a program called Alpha Zero. And it started doing things that you could never even imagine and making new circuits in ways that surprised you. Eventually, maybe, there will come a time where LLMs or some version of them reach a mastery of human knowledge in the same way. What is going to happen when you then let that loose? And it does the same potentially, does the same thing as Alpha Zero. Yeah, I think it'd be great. So I think that's what to me is, it would be the AGI moment is, you know, then it will discover a new superconductor room temperature superconductor that's possible in the laws of physics. But we just haven't found that needle in the haystack or a new source of energy and you way to build optimal batteries. I think all of those things will become possible. And indeed, not just possible, I think they will happen once we get to a system that's first of all got to, you know, human level knowledge. And then there'll be some techniques. Maybe it will have to help invent some of those techniques, but kind of like Alpha Zero that will allow it to go beyond into new on charter territory. That idea of it, like plugging weather system into its brain, like it's going to be on that. That one. Yeah, exactly. All right, exciting times. Demis, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, believes AGI is 5-10 years away and requires breakthroughs in continual learning, memory, and long-term reasoning, not just scaling current models.
  2. He defines AGI as a system matching all human cognitive abilities, including high creativity and physical intelligence, which current AI lacks.
  3. Hassabis sees hybrid systems (e.g., combining neural networks with symbolic methods) as key, and considers world models from video generation as steps toward AGI.
  4. Google is developing smart glasses with partners like Warby Parker, aiming for a hands-free AI assistant, with prototypes possibly by summer.
  5. He clarifies Google has no current plans to include ads in Gemini, emphasizing trust as critical for AI assistants.

Summary:

In this interview, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis discusses the path to AGI, addressing skepticism about AI progress. He asserts that internal confidence never wavered, as improvements continue through pre-training, post-training, and thinking paradigms. However, Hassabis believes one or two major breakthroughs—such as continual learning, better memory, and long-term reasoning—are likely needed for AGI, which he defines as a system capable of all human cognitive abilities, including high creativity and physical intelligence.

He dismisses the notion that current systems are close to AGI, citing their inability to invent new theories or art genres like Einstein or Picasso. Hassabis highlights hybrid systems combining neural networks with symbolic methods as promising, and sees world models from video generation as essential for planning and robotics. On products, he reveals Google is developing smart glasses for a hands-free AI assistant, with prototypes expected by summer, leveraging partnerships with Warby Parker and Samsung.

He emphasizes that trust is paramount for AI assistants, clarifying that Google has no current plans to introduce ads in Gemini, despite industry speculation. Hassabis also praises coding advancements like vibe coding, which empowers creatives, and notes Google’s focus on both scaling current paradigms and pursuing novel architectures. Overall, he balances optimism about near-term progress with caution about the remaining challenges to achieving true AGI.

FAQs

Hassabis says they were never questioning progress, and improvements have continued through pre-training, post-training, and thinking paradigms. He notes that more can be extracted from existing architectures and data, with plenty of headroom remaining.

He leans toward needing one or two more big breakthroughs, such as continual learning, better memory, and long-term reasoning. However, he believes large foundation models will be a key component of AGI systems.

He defines AGI as a system that can exhibit all human cognitive capabilities, including the highest levels of creativity, like inventing new theories of physics or creating new art genres. He estimates we are 5 to 10 years away from this.

He used it as a fun example to highlight how video and image generators can act as world models, understanding intuitive physics and enabling long-term planning. These capabilities are essential steps toward AGI.

Hassabis says prototypes are in development with partners like Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, and they may be available by summer. The glasses aim to provide a hands-free universal digital assistant for everyday life.

Hassabis states there are currently no plans to add ads to Gemini. He emphasizes that trust is critical for an assistant, and any advertising model must be handled carefully to avoid confusing users.

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