Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says AI scaling 'must be pushed to the maximum'

"Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, whose company just released Gemini 3 to widespread acclaim, has made it clear where he stands on the issue. "The scaling of the current systems, we must push that to the maximum, because at the minimum, it will be a key component of the final AGI system," he said at the Axios' AI+ Summit in San Francisco last week. "It could be the entirety of the AGI system.""

"AI scaling laws suggest that the more data and compute an AI model is given, the smarter it will get. Hassabis said that scaling alone will likely get the industry to AGI, but that he suspects there will need to be "one or two" other breakthroughs as well. The problem with scaling alone is that there is a limit to publicly available data, and adding compute means building data centers, which is expensive and taxing on the environment."

""Most interesting problems scale extremely badly," he said at the National University of Singapore in April. "You cannot just assume that more data and more compute means smarter AI.""

Scaling laws indicate that more data and compute tend to make AI models smarter. The scaling of current systems must be pushed to the maximum because, at minimum, it will be a key component of a final AGI system and could be the entirety of that system. Scaling alone will likely bring the industry close to AGI, but one or two additional breakthroughs may be required. Practical limits include finite publicly available data, the high expense and environmental costs of building and running data centers, and emerging signs of diminishing returns on massive scaling investments.

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