DeepMind CEO Says AGI Will Be Bigger Than Electricity or Fire

For the second time this year, Demis Hassabis predicted that artificial general intelligence would arrive before the end of the decade. This time, however, he said it won’t simply be another technological breakthrough—it will rival the discovery of electricity or fire.

In a blog post published Tuesday on X, the Google DeepMind CEO said AGI is “probably only a few short years away,” describing it as a technology that could reshape human civilization.

“When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity–nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.”

According to Hassabis, AGI, the point when computers can understand, learn, and perform a wide range of tasks as well as or better than humans, should not be compared with advances such as the internet or mobile computing because its impact could be even greater.

“It is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire,” he wrote. “If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.”

Despite that optimism, Hassabis warned that AI capabilities are advancing faster than society’s ability to understand and manage the risks, pointing to cybersecurity threats that already exist with today’s frontier models, adding that future systems could introduce biological, nuclear, and other national security risks.

As AI becomes more agentic and capable of self-improvement, he argued, stronger technical safeguards will be needed to ensure humans remain in control.

“On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems–and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time.”

The news comes as AI leaders have spent much of the past year since the public launch of ChatGPT in 2022 warning that AGI could arrive sooner than expected. In January 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said human-level AI could emerge within one to five years and warned governments were underestimating the pace of development. Then, in June, Hassabis predicted AGI would arrive by 2030 and warned society had “not long to prepare.”

To address those concerns, Hassabis proposed creating a U.S. Frontier AI Standards Body modeled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, a private organization that oversees U.S. brokerage firms. The federally supervised public-private partnership would be funded primarily by the AI industry and staffed by independent technical experts and open-source representatives to evaluate frontier AI models.

“The rapid progress we’re seeing in AI requires a new approach to testing frontier AI model capabilities that is dynamic, adaptable, and rigorous,” he wrote. “The US is well positioned, given its economic and technical standing, to take the first step in developing such a framework.”

The proposal follows similar calls made by the prominent members of the industry to establish oversight for advanced AI.

In May 2023, during a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called for a federal agency to license powerful AI systems and require independent safety audits. More recently, last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a voluntary framework for reviewing advanced AI models before their release. That same month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI is getting too powerful and safety rules akin to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are needed.

Despite the push to regulate AI development, Hassabis said the world has only a limited window to establish common standards before AGI arrives.

“The future is not yet written, we must use this precious window before AGI arrives to shape this technology for the benefit of all humanity,” he wrote. “What we collectively do now will determine how the next phase of civilisation unfolds. By safely stewarding AGI into the world, we can enter a new golden age of scientific discovery and progress, and usher in a bright future of incredible human flourishing.”