Shane Legg

Co-founder and chief AGI scientist of Google DeepMind. He helped popularize the term “artificial general intelligence” in the early 2000s, and his 2008 PhD thesis, Machine Super Intelligence, was among the first academic works to take the risks seriously.

He is notable for making one of the earliest public AGI forecasts and sticking to it.

Timelines

• 2011, his blog: about a 50% chance of human-level AGI by 2028, a forecast he had been giving since around 2009.
• 2023-10-26, Dwarkesh Podcast: still about 50% by 2028. More than a decade on, the forecast looked prescient rather than wild.

See AGI timelines.