Deepmind's Hassabis says humanity is 'in the foothills of the singularity,' expecting AGI within five years; LeCun and Vinyals offer more cautious views on current AI capabilities

Deepmind co-founder Demis Hassabis stated at Google I/O 2026 that humanity is 'standing in the foothills of the singularity' and expects AGI is possible within the next five years, describing it as '10 times the industrial revolution at 10 times the speed.'

Yann LeCun, AI researcher at AMI Labs, argues that current LLMs (large language models that understand and generate text) are not truly intelligent because real intelligence emerges when solving new problems without prior training, not from accumulated knowledge.

Oriol Vinyals, co-lead of the Gemini program, acknowledges that today's models excel at code and math with improving reasoning capabilities, but notes the ability to learn from experience and produce real breakthroughs remains absent.