Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has framed the coming of artificial general intelligence as an upheaval that could dwarf the Industrial Revolution in both scale and speed - transforming the global economy within a decade rather than a century. At the same time, he said, AI is simultaneously overhyped in the short term and drastically underappreciated over the long run.
"I sometimes quantify the coming of AGI as 10 times the industrial revolution at 10 times the speed," Hassabis told Harry Stebbings on the 20VC podcast, as reported by "Hvylya". "Literally today and in the next year things are a bit overhyped in AI. But on the other hand, I still think it's very underappreciated how revolutionary this is going to be in the time scale of about 10 years."
On labor markets, Hassabis acknowledged the disruption will be real but stopped short of calling it catastrophic. He pushed back against the argument made by investors like Marc Andreessen that this cycle is no different from past technological shifts. "I do think this is going to be bigger than all of those previous technological breakthroughs," he said, citing the internet and mobile as comparisons that fall short. The Industrial Revolution brought modern medicine and slashed child mortality from 40 percent, he noted. "Ideally this time around we mitigate some of the downsides a bit better," he said.
Hassabis pointed to several mechanisms for redistributing the economic gains. Pension funds and sovereign wealth funds should invest in leading AI companies so the returns flow broadly, he argued. He also said AI itself could generate breakthroughs that reshape the economy entirely - including fusion energy, better batteries, and new superconductors. On existing infrastructure, he claimed AI could squeeze "30, 40 percent more efficiency out of our national grids."
Europe's challenge, he said, is not talent but capital. The UK produces world-class graduates from institutions like Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, and UCL, and DeepMind's London base gave it a structural advantage in recruiting top European researchers. But the region lacks the growth-stage funding to turn startups into trillion-dollar companies. Hassabis said he is trying to change that with Isomorphic Labs, which is headquartered in London. He suggested unlocking pension fund investment into growth-stage companies as the single most impactful policy change for UK tech.
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