- Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will compete with human competence in the next five to 10 years, and that it will “exhibit all the complicated capabilities” people have. This could escalate worries over job replacement with AI—which is already in motion at companies like Klarna and Workday.
What your coworker looks like is expected to change in the very near future. Instead of humans huddled in office cubicles, people will be working alongside digital colleagues. That’s because Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said AI will catch up to human capabilities in just a few years—not decades.
“Today’s [AI] systems, they’re very passive, but there’s still a lot of things they can’t do,” Hassabis said during a briefing at Deepmind’s London headquarters on Monday. “But over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence.”
Hassabis sees the burgeoning potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in particular—technology that is capable of being just as smart, if not smarter, than human beings. The CEO himself defined AGI as being able to “exhibit all the complicated capabilities humans can.”
But workers can buy themselves a little more time before they’re swapping office gossip with a robot coworker.
“We’re not quite there yet. These systems are very impressive at certain things. But there are other things they can’t do yet, and we’ve still got quite a lot of research work to go before that,” Hassabis said.
The leader of the AI frontrunner is just one of many who have their finger on the pulse of emerging technology; it’s a growing concession among CEOs that all-human workforces are on the brink of extinction. Whether it be “digital employees” or robots manning factory floors, electronic workers are becoming a staple of boardroom conversations and labor strategies. This is much to the behest of human workers—who are often told AI will optimize their professional lives, not take over their jobs.
Google DeepMind did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
AI’s evolution and the end of all-human workforces
AGI’s rapid development is another clear marker of the trajectory of AI’s workforce impact. And Hassabis isn’t the only tech leader to make this big prediction.
Robin Li, the CEO of Chinese tech giant Baidu, has also estimated that AGI will become as competent as human beings—but in a more distant future than 2030.
“AGI is still quite a few years away. Today, a lot of people talk about AGI, [and] they’re saying … it’s probably two years away, it’s probably, you know, five years away. I think [it] is more than 10 years away,” Li said at the VivaTech conference in Paris last year.
While other leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman contend that AGI will be ready for action a lot sooner, the workforce is already feeling the ramifications of AI doing human jobs. About 41% of bosses believe they’ll need to cut down their workforce in the next five years, according to a Work Economic Forum report, and a major reason is to make way for AI. Those employees’ skills—including reading, writing, mathematics, and manual adeptness—will phase out with the advent of AI; chatbots, machines, and large language models (LLM) move faster than people, and don’t require benefits or a salary.
Marc Benioff brought that AI reality to light at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this year. The CEO helming the $320 billion software company Salesforce told other leaders in the room that a big change was coming: they’ll be the last cohort of CEOs to manage all-human workforces.
“From this point forward…we will be managing not only human workers but also digital workers,” Benioff said during a panel.
And the transition is well underway—Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski already believes AI can do all the work that humans can do, and is putting that theory into practice at his business. Klarna stopped hiring in 2023, and has welcomed natural attrition that has brought his workforce down from 4,500 to about 3,500 since. Instead of bringing in new staffers to do the work, the company has been using AI to bolster its marketing, in-house lawyer, and communications needs. Klarna’s chatbot can do the work of 700 full-time customer service agents, settling queries nine minutes quicker than humans.
This year workplace management giant Workday also laid off about 1,750 employees—about 8.5% of its workforce—to prioritize “innovation investments like AI.” In a memo to staffers, CEO Carl Eschenbach said the business had reached a “pivotal moment” in the market, and an increased need for AI will call for cost reductions elsewhere. Humans took the hit.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
