Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, explains what needs to happen to achieve AGI

• AI leaders disagree about how long it will take to realize AGI, a machine that can think like humans.
• Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, says “AI agents” are the next phase of AI after chatbots.
• These systems will be able to plan, act, reason and use tools, among other things, he said.

Experts disagree about what it will take to achieve artificial general intelligence — a still-hypothetical form of robotic intelligence that mimics human abilities.

According to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and recently named Nobel laureate, there is no secret recipe to get there.

At the Times Tech Summit earlier this month, Hassabis said that the next version of AI after chatbots like ChatGPT – which passively answer questions, summarize text and conduct research – will be agent-based systems with the following features and capabilities:

• planning. These systems can think ahead, plan a trip or book tickets.
• acting. You need to be able to trade in the real world.
• argumentation. You should think through problems. Hassabis pointed to AlphaGo, DeepMind’s AI, which beat humans in Go for the first time and demonstrated thinking skills in the game’s defined area. The next phase of agent-based systems will apply these capabilities to real-world contexts.
• Better memory. They should remember the details that were told to them.
• Better personalization. You should understand a user’s likes, likes and dislikes.
• Use of tools. You can use hardware like robots in the physical world, software like a calculator, or even other AI systems.

However, Hassabis said at the summit that he believes the full realization of an artificial general intelligence that can think as well as humans is still a decade away.