DeepMind CEO: AGI Will Have ’10x the Impact’ of the Industrial Revolution

When Demis Hassabis took the stage at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week, he wasn’t there to talk about incremental improvements to large language models. The Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind had something far more consequential on his mind: the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence, and what it means for humanity.

“AGI is on the horizon. Its impact could be ten times greater than the Industrial Revolution—and happen at an accelerated pace.” — Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind

A $10 Trillion Bet on Intelligence

Hassabis’s prediction isn’t just ambitious rhetoric from a technologist selling his vision. It represents the consensus emerging among the most serious researchers in the field: we are approaching a threshold where machines will match or exceed human cognitive abilities across virtually every domain. The implications extend far beyond Silicon Valley balance sheets.

The Industrial Revolution transformed human civilization over centuries, shifting societies from agrarian to industrial, creating entirely new economic systems, and fundamentally altering how humans live and work. Hassabis believes AGI will achieve comparable—or greater—disruption in a fraction of that time.

Medicine and biology are already feeling the effects. DeepMind’s AlphaFold solved a 50-year-old protein folding problem that has accelerated drug discovery worldwide. Hassabis pointed to this as merely a preview of what’s possible when AI systems can reason across scientific disciplines.

Materials science and physics represent the next frontier. AI systems are already proposing novel materials with properties humans hadn’t conceived, designing experiments that would take researchers years to plan, and spotting patterns in data that escape even expert human eyes.

Mathematics—long considered a bastion of purely human creativity—is seeing AI-assisted proofs that solve problems mathematicians have struggled with for decades.

“What began as a dream has now become central to global discussions. AI is becoming the pivotal driver of future scientific discoveries.” — Demis Hassabis

The Memory Bottleneck Nobody Talks About

Yet for all the optimism, Hassabis was candid about the constraints holding back progress. In a separate interview with CNBC, he revealed a critical choke point that affects even a company with Google’s resources: memory chips.

“The whole supply chain is kind of strained,” Hassabis explained. “You need a lot of chips to be able to experiment on new ideas at a big enough scale that you can actually see if they’re going to work.”

The shortage isn’t abstract. Google sees “so much more demand” for Gemini and its other AI models than it can currently serve. Researchers across the industry—from OpenAI to Meta to Anthropic—are competing for the same limited pool of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips produced by just three suppliers: Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.

Google has an advantage most competitors lack: its own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), custom-designed chips optimized for AI workloads. But even that isn’t enough. “It still, in the end, actually comes down to a few suppliers of a few key components,” Hassabis admitted.

The numbers tell the story. Google projects capital expenditures of $175 billion to $185 billion for 2026—a staggering sum that reflects both the opportunity and the infrastructure costs of the AI era.

The Responsibility Question

Hassabis didn’t shy away from the harder questions. With transformative power comes transformative risk, and the DeepMind CEO emphasized that humility and caution must accompany ambition.

He called for “an inclusive dialogue among the international community” to guide AGI development responsibly. The technology’s potential benefits—from curing diseases to solving climate change—are matched only by its potential to disrupt labor markets, concentrate power, and create new categories of risk that society hasn’t yet learned to manage.

The path forward, according to Hassabis, requires cooperation that extends beyond technology companies to encompass governments, civil society, and the broader public. The goal isn’t just to build AGI, but to build it in a way that distributes its benefits broadly rather than capturing them narrowly.

For an industry often criticized for moving fast and breaking things, Hassabis’s message represented a notable acknowledgment: some things are too important to get wrong.

This article was reported by the ArtificialDaily editorial team. For more information, visit ITP.net and AOL/Business Insider.