AI has the potential to ‘cure all diseases’

Google’s Sir Demis Hassabis insists the technology will be ‘incredibly positive’ for the world and have general human cognitive abilities within 10 years.

Sir Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind. Picture: AFP

Sir Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, has predicted that artificial intelligence with general human cognitive abilities will be reached within ten years and that the technology holds the potential to “cure all diseases”.

The British AI pioneer told The Times Tech Summit that “two or three big innovations” were needed to make artificial general intelligence possible.

Hassabis defined this as “a general system, which is capable of doing any cognitive task that humans can”.

“That was the original goal of AI as a field and that is the goal DeepMind has,” he said.

Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The company was acquired by Google for 400 million pounds in 2014. It has been responsible for a number of breakthroughs in AI, most recently in its AlphaFold project, which can predict how proteins behave and could have applications in antibiotics, cancer therapy and materials science.

Hassabis, 48, said there was “crazy hype” on the part of those warning that AI poses an existential threat to humanity as well as the “Pollyanna camp, who think it’s all just another technology”.

He said the latter camp was “clearly wrong” and that “this is far bigger than the internet or mobile, or something like that. It’s epoch defining”.

Last year Hassabis was among leaders in the AI field who issued a public warning about the risks the technology poses to humanity. He said his experience in games - where he had seen an AI learn to play chess and within eight hours be capable of beating not only the best human player but specialised chess computing systems - had made him think about the risks.

“It’s quite incredible. That’s just a game and it’s narrow but I don’t see any reason why that capability can’t be generalised to more general systems and language and world models, and so on. It will be immensely powerful, it has to be handled with care.”

Hassabis told the summit he remained confident AI would be “incredibly positive” for the world. “We are in shooting distance of curing all diseases with AI, helping with climate [crisis], new energy sources, as well as improving productivity, enriching our daily lives, making mundane admin things be dealt with automatically. Those are all amazing, and it’s all coming very soon.”

The Times