Tech Leaders Warn Superintelligence Could Arrive by 2028 at India AI Summit

When the world’s most powerful AI executives gather in one room, their disagreements often make headlines. But at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week, something unusual happened: they agreed on the timeline. The question is no longer if artificial general intelligence will arrive—it’s when.

“The world may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence—by the end of 2028.” — Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI

A Once-in-a-Generation Moment

Google CEO Sundar Pichai set the tone on day four of the summit, describing the current era as a “once-in-a-generation” shift. “We have the opportunity to improve lives at a once-in-a-generation scale,” he told attendees. But he added a crucial caveat: the technology’s positive outcome is neither guaranteed nor automatic.

The gathering brought together an unprecedented roster of AI leadership. Alongside Pichai and Altman were Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Accenture’s Julie Sweet, and Microsoft’s Brad Smith. Their message was remarkably consistent: the technology is advancing faster than most anticipated, and the window for responsible governance is narrowing.

AGI ‘On the Horizon’

Demis Hassabis offered perhaps the most striking assessment. The DeepMind CEO, whose company has been at the forefront of AI research since 2010, declared that artificial general intelligence is now “on the horizon.” His comparison was sobering: AGI could have “ten times the impact of the Industrial Revolution, probably at ten times the speed of anything else.”

The Industrial Revolution transformed human civilization over roughly a century. If Hassabis is correct, we may see comparable change compressed into a decade—or less.

“It’s still to be written how we can make that beneficial for the whole world.” — Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind

The Adoption Paradox

Not all executives shared the same urgency about immediate transformation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei offered a more measured perspective, highlighting what he called the “adoption paradox.” While AI models are improving exponentially in areas like software engineering and biomedical research, he noted that “adoption across enterprises and economies will be slower.”

The capability-diffusion gap represents a critical challenge. Fundamental AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, but the time required for those capabilities to diffuse into real-world applications remains substantial. Companies need time to integrate, train employees, and restructure workflows around new AI tools.

Enterprise readiness varies dramatically by sector. Financial services and technology companies have moved quickly, while manufacturing, healthcare, and government adoption lags significantly. This uneven landscape creates both opportunities and risks.

The Open vs. Closed Debate

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen addressed one of the industry’s most contentious questions: should AI models be open or proprietary? His answer was pragmatic. “Companies have to behave differently and recognise what their sustainable advantage is,” he said. “It can’t over time be just the model. It has to be the use cases—what people are doing with the models.”

The debate has intensified as open-source models from Meta, Mistral, and DeepSeek have closed the gap with proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. Narayen’s comments suggest a future where competitive advantage comes from application, not architecture.

Jobs, Inequality, and the Global South

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet tackled the jobs question head-on, drawing an unexpected parallel to 2013. That year, an Oxford University study warned that 47% of US jobs were automatable and predicted robotic process automation would devastate IT services. The opposite happened—employment in the sector grew.

“AI will end up creating many more jobs through companies that are able to reinvent themselves and capture the technology’s full potential,” Sweet argued. Her optimism was tempered by Microsoft President Brad Smith, who warned that AI could “either close or exacerbate the economic and technology divide between the developed world and the Global South.”

“Compared to the people who lived in the Bronze Age, all of you, all of us are already geniuses.” — Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President, Microsoft

The Road Ahead

The summit concludes with a clear message: 2026 is a pivotal year. With $2.5 trillion flowing into AI infrastructure, models advancing at unprecedented rates, and global leaders finally converging on timelines, the industry has entered a new phase.

Sam Altman’s 2028 prediction for early superintelligence may prove optimistic or pessimistic—historically, AI forecasts have been unreliable. But the consensus among those building the technology is unmistakable: the transition to AGI is no longer a distant theoretical possibility. It is an engineering problem with a countdown clock.

For policymakers, business leaders, and citizens, the India AI Impact Summit offered both inspiration and warning. The technology to reshape civilization is coming. Whether that reshaping benefits humanity—or fragments it—remains the open question of our time.

This article was reported by the ArtificialDaily editorial team. For more information, visit Economic Times and the Atlantic Council.