DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg launches AGI institute, warns safety must keep pace

Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg has warned that the rapid advance of artificial intelligence must not outstrip the safeguards meant to monitor and control it, as he launched a new institute dedicated to the deployment of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The DeepMind Institute is intended to widen public discussion of AGI, which Google DeepMind describes as a system possessing the cognitive capabilities of the human brain. Its scope will span science, education, society, policy, philosophy and human flourishing. The institute's first three essays examine AI safety, economic policy and principles for what it terms a "new utopianism."

Legg's caution comes amid growing concern that increasingly capable AI agents can write software, carry out autonomous tasks and help develop AI systems — raising the prospect that the technology could evolve faster than the safeguards designed to oversee it.

He described Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei's call to slow, but not pause, the release of frontier models as "interesting directionally" and "worth considering." Legg also said it was premature to declare that AGI had been achieved, despite recent claims by executives at Nvidia and OpenAI.

He said he remains comfortable with his forecast of a 50% chance of achieving "minimal" AGI by 2028.