Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance at the Google I/O 2025 recently. On day one of the developer conference, a fireside chat with DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, was scheduled. However, when the session started, he was joined by Brin. Throughout the session, both spoke about artificial intelligence (AI), the new Gemini tools, capabilities of the company’s new models, and the roadmap to artificial general intelligence (AGI). The Google Co-Founder also revealed the reason behind his coming back from retirement.
Sergey Brin and Demis Hassabis on AGI
The fireside chat between Brin, Hassabis, and Big Technology’s founder, Alex Kantrowitz (moderator), was live-streamed on YouTube on May 21. One of the biggest talking points of the conversation was AGI and how Google looks at the technology.
Hassabis explained that for him, AGI is a theoretical construct about what the human brain, as an architecture, can do. The point is, humans, with the same brain architecture, can do a wide range of tasks. These include creativity, rational thinking, scientific exploration, and most importantly, true innovation. AI models, on the other hand, cannot handle the entire spectrum. While some models are fine-tuned to be better at some tasks, generalistic models are just average at everything.
“It’s clear to me today, systems don’t have that. And then the other thing, why I think it’s sort of overblown, the hype today on AGI is that our systems are not consistent enough to be considered to be fully General. Yet they’re quite general,” Hassabis added.
However, this does not mean that the DeepMind CEO does not believe it is unachievable. Pointing out a few barriers in current AI systems, such as reasoning ability, creative invention and accuracy of world models, he said that AGI could be achieved with “one or two more breakthroughs.”
However, when asked a probable timeline for AGI, before or after 2030, Brin was quick to answer, “Before.” Hassabis, on the other hand, answered, “Just after.” The Google Co-Founder added, “We fully intend that Gemini will be the very first AGI.”
Brin being bullish on AGI is no surprise given that he came out of retirement in 2023 to help the company get a first mover’s advantage in the AI space. Explaining why he chose to come back to work, he said, “As a computer scientist, it’s a very unique time in history, like, honestly, anybody who’s a computer scientist should not be retired right now. Should be working on AI.”
