Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, told Sherwood News on May 28 that his AGI forecast has moved earlier: he now expects AGI by 2029-2030, compressed from his earlier estimate of 2030-2035. The five-year shift is attributable, in his framing, to faster-than-expected progress on reasoning and agent capability.
Hassabis is one of the more measured public voices on AGI timelines. He has historically pushed back against the more aggressive predictions from his peers at OpenAI and Anthropic. A forecast compression from him carries different weight than the same shift from a less-conservative source.
The interpretation worth applying is that “AGI” remains a category that different labs define differently. Hassabis has tended toward a stricter definition (matching or exceeding human performance across a broad cognitive range) than the lower bars some competitors invoke. His 2029-30 framing, applied against the stricter definition, is meaningful. Applied against a looser definition, it has been arrived at by other labs already.
Reported by Sherwood News on 2026-05-28.
