Another week, another prominent name being perhaps all too optimistic about the future of AI. This time it’s Google DeepMind CEO and former Lionhead developer Demis Hassabis, claiming that advances in AI will usher in a seismic shift that’s “going to be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and maybe 10 times faster.”

To briefly recap, you may recognize Demis Hassabis as the co-designer and lead programmer of Bullfrog’s 1994 management sim Theme Park. Continuing to work alongside Peter Molyneux at Lionhead Studios throughout the early 2000s, Hassabis later went on to co-found DeepMind alongside Mustafa Suleyman in 2010.

Long story short, Google bought DeepMind for $400 million in 2014, Suleyman departed in 2019 to head up AI at Microsoft, and Hassabis has since described DeepMind as “the engine room of Google” in a recent conversation with The Guardian.

In this latest interview, Hassabis claims that Artificial General Intelligence will be a reality “maybe in the next five to 10 years, possibly the lower end of that.” He muses, “I don’t know if it will be a single moment.”

It may be a gradual thing that happens, but we’ll have something that we could sort of reasonably call AGI, that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities humans have.

Hassabis describes himself as “a cautious optimist,” trusting in humanity’s ingenuity and adaptability. He elaborates, “I mean, look where we are today. Our brains were evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and we’re in modern civilization.”

Undeterred by our present reality, Hassabis goes on to trace the outline of a utopia enjoying rapid, AGI-fueled advancement and what he describes as an era of “radical abundance.” He says, “It should lead to incredible productivity and therefore prosperity for society. Of course, we’ve got to make sure it gets distributed fairly, but that’s more of a political question.”