Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, used Google's developer conference last week to revise his AGI timeline forward. His base case remains around 2030, but he now describes 2029 as plausible — language he had not used as recently as Q1. Speaking on stage and in follow-up interviews, Hassabis said the field is standing in 'the foothills of the singularity' and warned that society has, in his estimate, only a few years left to prepare for systems that meaningfully match or exceed human cognitive performance across most economically valuable tasks.
The substantive shift is what he said about recursive self-improvement. Hassabis confirmed that 'all the leading labs are quite focused on that' — meaning systems capable of materially accelerating their own development. That is a different kind of statement than a marketing claim about a benchmark. Recursive self-improvement is the specific dynamic that AI-safety researchers have pointed to for two decades as the regime where capability gains stop being linear and prediction stops being reliable. A DeepMind CEO publicly naming it as an explicit research target across multiple frontier labs is news.
Hassabis also flagged where preparation is lagging. His specific complaint was directed at economists — 'my economist friends, I feel, are still not taking this seriously enough' — and at governments that he says are moving more slowly than the technology. This is consistent with broader patterns: the EU spent May negotiating a 16-month delay to its high-risk AI Act obligations, the U.S. has no comprehensive federal AI law, and frontier-model evaluation regimes remain voluntary. Hassabis is not the first lab leader to make this argument, but he is one of the few with the technical credibility to make it without it reading as marketing.
A takeaway for learners: 'when will AGI arrive' is the wrong question to over-fixate on. The useful question is 'what changes for me in each plausible scenario?' If frontier capability lands in 2029, what skills compound and what skills depreciate in the meantime? Lab leaders disagree on dates; they agree the trend line is real. Plan against the trend, not against any one CEO's specific guess.