Google Predicts When Artificial General Intelligence Will Arrive.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis predicts that artificial general intelligence (AGI) - as intelligent as or smarter than a human - will begin to emerge in the next five to ten years.

'I think today's systems are very passive, and there are still many things they cannot do. But I believe that over the next five to ten years, many of these capabilities will start to come to the forefront, and we will begin to move towards what we call artificial general intelligence,' said Hassabis, according to CNBC.

Hassabis defined AGI as 'a system capable of demonstrating all the complex abilities characteristic of humans.'

'We're not quite there yet. These systems are really impressive in certain things. But there are other things they still can't do, and we still have a lot of research work to do before that happens,' said Hassabis.

Hassabis is not the only one who believes that it will take Time for AGI to appear. Last year, the CEO of the Chinese tech giant Baidu, Robin Li, stated that AGI 'will not appear for at least 10 years,' disputing the emotional predictions of some of his colleagues that this breakthrough would happen much sooner.

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January that he sees a form of AI that is 'better than almost all humans at performing nearly all tasks' emerging in the 'next two to three years.'

Other tech leaders see AGI emerging even faster. Cisco's Chief Product Officer, Jit Patel, believes there is a chance to see an instance of AGI this year. 'There are three main phases of AI,' Patel told CNBC in an interview at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona earlier this month.

'There is the basic AI that we are all experiencing now. Then there is artificial general intelligence, where cognitive abilities match those of humans. Then there is what is called superintelligence,' Patel said.

'I think you will see significant evidence that AGI will be operational by 2025. We're not talking about years. I think superintelligence, at best, will emerge in a few years.'

Artificial superintelligence, or ASI, is expected to emerge after AGI and surpass human intelligence. However, 'nobody really knows' when such a breakthrough will occur, said Hassabis.

Hassabis said the main challenge in achieving artificial general intelligence is getting modern AI systems to the point of understanding context from the real world.