The premise is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away".
If this is true, establishing an institution to ensure things like "publishing model cards with technical details, maintaining strong internal cybersecurity, vetting key personnel, and providing sufficient resourcing for safety and security research" is really mostly irrelevant.
TFA does talk about what really needs to be done, but punts this into future work: "Even if we solve these hard technical challenges, there will be further complex economic and philosophical questions to tackle: what sorts of new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in a post-scarcity world? What values do we want to live by, what will meaning and purpose be, and how might even the human condition itself change?"
There's also a need to consider the rights that this new intelligence should have.
> what sorts of new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in a post-scarcity world
What sort of new economic models did we come up with to help everyone thrive in a post-X world? Like, food production is really a solved technical problem. We can feed anyone on the planet if we wanted to. Another example: we could put everyone who's homeless into some sort of a house. Have we done that yet?
Food production is indeed a solved problem in most countries (we are almost post-scarcity when it comes to food), which is why obesity is a much bigger issue than hunger today. Hunger is present pretty much only in conflict zones. I fully expect such issues in conflict zones, even in AI post-scarcity world.
Housing is definitely not post-scarcity today, building a house is still very expensive, not to mention the limited availability of land zoned for housing.
> Hunger is present pretty much only in conflict zones.
How do you explain the existence of food banks in peaceful first world countries?
Food is allocated using a variety of mechanisms in peaceful first world countries, primarily money but also via government assistance, kinship, friendship, community, etc.
At any given time a lot of people have problems with one or more of those systems. Money is easy to run out of because it's used for everything, the government can be slow and difficult, relationships can fray, people can be isolated, etc. Food banks exist as a backstop for when the regular means of allocating are not working.
Without trying to sound crass, food banks _are_ the reason we don't see people dying of starvation in first world countries. If people need food, a food bank will give it to them no questions asked.
Unfortunately this is not just precarious, it's extremely vulnerable to changing political conditions. Many of the food bank services in my state have lost significant funding owing to the use of words like 'women' or 'black' in their grants, which were duly grepped for and shut down.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Cuts-t...
Civilization can't rely effectively on systems that are this fragile.
> Civilization can't rely effectively on systems that are this fragile.
That's American politics in a nutshell. We've spent 250 years assuming scruples and common decency would be sufficient.
The fact food banks exist suggest over all food scarcity is solved in that specific culture. - if it wasn't there wouldn't be any spare food for a food bank
> which is why obesity is a much bigger issue than hunger today
Obesity is much more related to the type of food than the quantity.
Many developing countries have obesity issues due to scarcity of fresh and healthy food.
In some places coca cola is cheaper and / or more available than drinking water.
Post-scarcity? Sure, if you live in a first-world country and are upper middle class or higher. These tech-bro pundits have a very limited world view. The basic essentials of life are very scarce for millions and millions of people, and AI will probably make that worse, not better.
My great annoyance with all this blather about UBI and post-scarcity and new economic models is that it relies on taxing and redistributing the ~infinite profits of the largest tech companies on earth.
What in the history of our world gives anyone faith that those companies are going to start paying taxes instead of using "AGI" to engineer increasingly complex methods to avoid them so that their equity owners can pocket the profits?
https://itep.org/trump-meta-tesla-alphabet-amazon-obbba-taxe... - "The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero"
The fundamental issue is that if we really get something like this, scarcity will still exist. There will still be scarce things people want.
But the motivating justificatory structure for any inequality in allocation will have completely evaporated.
Am I crazy or does this just real like secular eschatology? What evidence do you have of any of this?
There is no real evidence that we'll reach AGI any time soon. It relies on AI continuing to scale, and we have no proof that will continue to be possible.
There is an alternative interpretation, which is that Demis looked at the US government's ham-fisted handling of Fable, and deciding that setting up a body to act as a buffer between the Trump admin and the AI companies would be a good thing.
The A(G)I can tell us if and how it needs to be regulated :-/
Blah-blah-singularity, so let's cripple the models so much they refuse to talk about React, because who knows if you are not cooking chemical weapons or meth in your browser's DOM, right?
strawmen are fun and helpful
How will this be enforced, at least with financial markets money is discrete, can largely be counted. This seems like a slippery slope to full blown surveillance of the internet and in general computing.
If AGI is truly imminent and will collectively effect all of us why not apply democracy to it, and vote for new AI models?
Agreed. There needs to be full transparency on the capabilities of the models. Being given access is one thing, but you can't have labs building powerful models that could be manipulating the entire planet without the public knowing. The public needs to have a good pulse on what the leading models are capable of so that we can remain in touch with reality.
Not surprised, seems these labs start calling for regulation once they are losing or have competition. OpenAI started calling it for it once Anthropic got better, Anthropic started calling for it once the Chinese models got good, Google is now calling it for it because they are falling far behind.
The proposal:
>The American government, he says, should develop a system for testing the safety of new AI models before they are released. “It’s important that it’s not just an industry body,” he adds. But a regular government agency wouldn’t do either. “It would not be able to move fast enough, or have the right resources.” Instead, Sir Demis suggests taking inspiration from FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a private agency in America that regulates brokers and stock markets.
Spoiler: The plan is .. add massive regulation, but only to the US, don't affect other countries developing it in any way other than "setting a good standard that'll hopefully influence them". Seems like an airtight plan.
If the USA takes up his suggestions, it will have an incentive to work on international frameworks and treaties with competing nations to make the regulation global.
It won't happen internationally, many countries and especially China don't want to hobble their own models.
That's called the carrot
The beauty of the United States' global hegemony is that it also has lots of sticks
Sufficient sticks to get China to agree to the same rules? Overseen by whom?
I do wonder what type of AI some of these leaders expect to be able to harness. If you create something that is true AI, won’t it be smarter than you to a level you cannot fathom. I was thinking of this idea/though-experiment (which I know is ridiculous) of what if dogs created humans thinking they could control them, and then just wound up being pets because their survival now depended on that new hierarchy that previously didn’t exist.
Seems to be a lot of hubris with some AI thought leaders thinking control will remain with them and be absolute.
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom is about this topic, quite a prescient read when it was published a decade ago.
"It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials" — but these are not the real problems plaguing modern developed societies, are they? What developed societies really need to figure out right now is how to distribute the already available resources without making people miserable, and so far AI hasn't been helpful.
For better or worse, humans (or any animal) are a lot better at reacting than planning. I'm sure this technology will play out differently than any one of us, or any collection of us, can imagine. The possibility space is enormous.
All the frontier labs are lobbying hard to lock down the AI market, because they see that their position at the top is temporary and that there's no secret sauce.
no, this post was written by Demis from Deepmind.
so the joke was the implication that they are not frontier.
>This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away.
There is a heatwave in London, perhaps Demis needs to stay out of the sun and drink more water.
Or perhaps he is seeking more funding/a fight to maintain his divisions AGI research budget.
Perhaps he’s a lot smarter than you.
On the STEM side, yes no doubt he is a lot smarter than me.
But as per the documentary of his life, he is wholly focused on AGI and will remain unfulfilled if he, or indeed anyone else, doesn't achieve it within his lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinking_Game
> On the STEM side, yes no doubt he is a lot smarter than me.
You’re selling yourself short.
Hassabis is a genuine prodigy and genius by any measure you would care to pick. Unlike a handful of others supposed tech leaders I can think of.
Just how smart? "A few short years" sounds like someone smart enough to know how to make a safe prediction.
More so, as he put the word probably in too.
>"...probably only a few short years away."
Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.
This is bad. Where is the transparency?
So a small group of technocrats get together behind closed doors and secretly share their AI breakthroughs, and determine whether it's too powerful or not for the plebs in the public.
Who is watching the watchers?
how would this help smaller labs? would it put more burdens on them when trying to compete with trillion-dollar companies or would it help?
He is saying that weaker models, as measured by a benchmark to distinguish "frontier" models, would be exempted. So an academic lab or startup that isn't yet producing frontier models would be exempted, but once it crossed some benchmark based threshold it would be subject to this kind of oversight.
Of course, right now you've got benchmaxxing going on; some companies specifically targetting benchmarks to appear stronger than they are on a wider range of tasks. Now you might see bench sandbagging, specifically looking weaker on certain benchmarks to avoid regulatory oversight.
For instance, once way I could see this going for open models is to release them undercooked; stop the RLVR process a bit early, leaving them a bit weaker on tool calls and agentic performance, but also release the RLVR environment so people can finish the process themselves.
In fact, this is fairly close to what Nvidia is already doing, the Nemotron 3 models are somewhat undercooked but they are releasing their full training pipeline, to encourage people to use these models as a base for further training, which will generally be done on Nvidia hardware.
If they are not a frontier-lab, they would not need to submit their models for safety test before release. At least that is the proposal.
Not exactly a "plan" - he's just saying we should have a standards body that assesses models for safety.
At this point I'd say the societal risk of AI isn't models gone wild, or used by the bad guys. Regulation will take care of itself, and it seems the AI companies will not only welcome it, but lobby for it to shift responsibility to the government.
The real risk of AI is societal disruption due to job displacement, and maybe other structural changes, and this is far harder to solve, and likely will not be solved, or even seriously addressed, until/unless politicians feel like their own jobs and well-being depends on them addressing it.
The risk of AI right now is centralization of power, and it's exactly what they're fighting for. Job displacement ties into that as well.
Also a mechanism to pull up the ladder behind themselves.
sigh
The standards body will have no teeth. whats to stop someone just not bothering?
Next, the threats he is asserting to check for (cyber, chemical, biological) are nice, but also not that useful.
We already have chemical and biological controls, that why I can't by anthrax spores or high concentration nitric acid.
The risks that AI has now are already playing out:
1) the evaporation of trust in the video as medium of "this happened"
2) systematic spying
3) job losses
Increased productivity means job losses, Tiktok, instagram and X are a wash with disinformtion campaign pumping your feeds with AI ragebait.
That is and will continue to fracture society so that only the strictly information controlled (ie authoritarian) have a functioning state.
if the author had bothered to engage with the world outside of tech, or even their local government, they would know that the proposal are dead in the water and frankly superfluous. The knowledge is out there, without AI. let us work on the issues we face now, rather than dipshit tech bro's miopic vision/funding manifesto.
Has anything really important been solved by AI yet, or where is this radical (imo) belief around AGI coming from?
Genuinely curious, I know there are some math problems solved and ML has been used for far longer than AI to improve things, but where is clean (efficient) energy, the cure for cancer (or any of the horrible neurological disorders, take your pick), new hardware designs, quantum computing solutions, etc etc, you get the gist.
Where are the things that will actually send humanity into the next era of civilization, I don't care about more React apps (but I do enjoy my coding companions for other things).
Heck, a proof for P=NP or P!=NP or solve the The Riemann Hypothesis. Just give me something truly exciting and I will believe AGI is around the corner, until then I will see it as cool technology, that while beneficial to me, also helped cause the biggest amount of disinformation we've every seen.
The point is that we need to have a safety plan in place before an AI is smart enough to radically reshape the world. If you've got an AI that's ready to start sending humanity into the next era of civilization, it may be too late to control when and how it does that.
> Heck, a proof for P=NP or P!=NP or solve the The Riemann Hypothesis. Just give me something truly exciting and I will believe AGI is around the corner, until then I will see it as cool technology, that while beneficial to me, also helped cause the biggest amount of disinformation we've every seen.
I hope you'll keep this in mind when those milestones are reached. What I've seen a lot of people do, unfortunately, is pretend that the impressive things nobody thought AI could do 5 years ago are trivial things that aren't very hard.
These people who read too many scifi books and confused them with reality are royally annoying.
There is real and potential harm from AI, but the more someone talks/write abut AI safety, the less they care about actual harm to real people, economy and what not.
If in 2020 I had sent you a book about the LLM achievements of 2026, you would probably have thought it was a science fiction book with no relation to reality, wouldn't you?
All that would happen from what he's proposing is such a watchdog would just be an explicit formal declaration of the US's national interests as being somehow the most legitimate, which in the context of current international relations is basically putting up a sign saying: "reject this!"
I find it mind boggling that someone could be this tone-deaf to the current situation. No "ally" of the US is going to (willingly) agree to this governance structure given the current US administration's "might makes right" proclamations and threats on sovereignty of its continental neighbours.
And non-allies would just ignore. Unless forced by said "might makes right", which in the long run will have no staying power.
Apart from its completely delusional formulation, what is most concerning about this blog post is that it indicates that all 3 major US labs have formally submitted to boot-licking Trump/Bessent/Lutnick. I had I guess vainly held out hope that Google might be more reticent to do so.
Sigh, another person talking their book while also talking their life’s work. One is bad, but the two together are unhinged.
I’m going to have to flag this because it is obnoxious and absurd.