20VC: DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution | Why LLMs Will Not Commoditise & We Have Not Hit Scaling Laws | Bottlenecks in AI & The Energy Crisis Caused By AI | Whether AI Will Do More to Harm or Help Inequality

**Demis Hassabis** (0:00)
The returns are still very substantial, although they're a bit less than they were, obviously, at the start of all of this scaling. I would say about 90% of the breakthroughs that underpin the modern AI industry were done either by Google Brain or Google Research or DeepMind. Those labs that have capability to invent new algorithmic ideas are going to start having bigger advantage over the next few years. The last set of ideas are sort of all the juices being rung out of them. I sometimes quantify like AGI, the coming of AGI is like 10 times the industrial revolution at 10 times the speed.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:33)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for the show today. I walked to this interview and I described it to my mother like this. We have amazing guests on the show, but very few honestly will be considered in the same realm as Newton, Turing, Einstein. Our guest today is one of the greatest minds on the planet, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have had the chance to sit down with him and discuss what we did today. This is a truly special one and one that I'll remember for a very long time. Enjoy the episode, and I so appreciate the time we had with a very special human being. I'm thrilled to welcome Demis Hassabis at DeepMind. But before we dive into the show today, did you know the industry average for booking a business trip is 45 minutes? That's a massive waste of your team's time. Well, with Navan, your employees can book a trip in just seven on average. Navan is the AI-powered travel and expense platform designed for companies that value efficiency. It drives real business impact through high employee adoption and automated policy control. Now, the built-in AI approves in-policy bookings and blocks the rest automatically. This allows finance teams to stop chasing receipts and skip the month-end chaos. And you get this real-time visibility that can save your company up to 15% on your travel budget. And that's why leaders like Visa, Stripe, Figma, and even Anthropic rely on Navan these days. Go to navan.com/20vctoday to see for yourself. And you'll get a chance to win two business class flights anywhere in continental US. No purchase necessary, rules apply. Head over to navan.com/20vc now. Once Navan simplifies the travel, Airwally simplifies the spend behind it. Founders, let's get real about the growth tax. You've raised VC funding and you're scaling globally. And it's no longer about shipping product. It's about orchestrating operations across continents. But suddenly, your payments and finance stack is choking your growth. You're logging in to lots of different banking portals, waiting days for transfers and reporting across entities. It's operational drag and it's at your scale. It's costing millions. That's why I'm so excited to partner with Airwallets. Airwallets are more than just a banking alternative to HSBC or Citi. Airwallets brings you an intelligent financial operating system that powers how global businesses operate and grow, allowing you to manage and automate banking, treasury, payments and spend. The most exciting part for me, they're heavily investing in agentic finance. If you're scaling globally, you need a banking and finance platform that's borderless, real-time and intelligent. Check out Airwallets today and see how they're helping thousands of businesses like Canva, McLaren and Deal. Scale at airwallets.com/20vc.
Terms and conditions apply. Your monies are safeguarded, not FSCS protected. See airwallets.com for more details. While Airwallets helps your money move globally, Vanta helps your security keep up. Security and compliance done wrong is a giant headache. Security and compliance done right though? Well, that's Vanta. Vanta helps you earn trust and speed up growth, no spreadsheets required. For startups low on time and resources, Vanta becomes your first security hire, using AI and automation to get you compliant, fast and unblock really big deals. And if you're big enterprises, Vanta is your AI-powered hub for compliance and risk, bringing together data from across your business and automating workflows so you can prove trust at any moment. Vanta scales with you at every stage. That's why top companies, from startups like Cursor to enterprises like Snowflake, choose Vanta. Do security and compliance right? My listeners can get $1,000 off Vanta by going to vanta.com/20vc. That's vanta.com/20vc for $1,000 off Vanta. You have now arrived at your destination. Demis, I'm so excited to be doing this. Thank you so much for joining me today.

**Demis Hassabis** (4:27)
Great to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:28)
Now, there are many places that we could have stopped, but I was watching actually the documentary that you did, which was fantastic. And I actually wanted to start on AGI. Definitions are very varying. You've been very thoughtful about what it means to you. And so I wanted to start, can you explain to me how you think about it today? So we get that as a kind of ground center.