It is very common for someone to ask, "How much time will it take for me to learn X or become like Y?" Here is my take - stop measuring how long something takes to learn and start measuring what it takes to get there.
When someone reaches a skill level, they did not just spend time. They put in effort to get there - hours of practice, attempts, repeated correction. That effort is the real unit, not the clock.
If you want to learn X in less time, operate with high intensity, and concentrate the effort into less time. If you spread the same effort across more time, you can lower the intensity and still arrive at the same place.
This is why "it took them 2 years" is a useless benchmark on its own. Two years at 1 hour a day is not the same effort as 2 years at 4 hours a day. The duration tells you nothing without the intensity behind it.
So the real question is not "how long will this take me?" It is "how much effort did this require, and how much intensity am I willing to bring?" Once you know the effort, you can choose your own pace.
Compress it with intensity, or stretch it with patience. Either path gets you there, but only if the total effort adds up.
Hope this helps.
Then it will shut everything else down from internet, have access to all financial and communication systems and go for synthesising an indestructible physical form!
We will call it “Ultron”
Demis Hassabis just defined the real test for AGI. It’s more brutal than anyone expected.
Train AI on all human knowledge. Cut it off at 1911. See if it independently discovers general relativity like Einstein did in 1915.
If it can, we have AGI. If not, we’re still building pattern matchers.
Hassabis: “My definition of AGI has never changed. A system that can exhibit all the cognitive capabilities that humans can.”
Not bar exams. Not coding competitions. All cognitive capabilities.
Hassabis: “The brain is the only existence proof we have, maybe in the universe, of a general intelligence.”
That’s why DeepMind studies neuroscience. Not for inspiration. For data. The human brain is the only confirmed evidence that general intelligence is physically possible.
If you want to build it, you study the only example that exists.
Hassabis: “True creativity, continual learning, long-term planning. They’re not good at those things.”
Current systems are impressive and broken simultaneously.
Hassabis: “They can get gold medals in international math olympiad questions, but they can still fall over on relatively simple math problems if you pose it in a certain way.”
Jagged intelligence. Brilliant in narrow domains. Incompetent when approached differently.
That inconsistency is the tell. A true general intelligence doesn’t spike in one direction and collapse in another.
The Einstein test cuts through all of it. No benchmarks. No leaderboards. No carefully curated evals.
Just a model, a knowledge cutoff, and the question of whether it can do what one human did alone in 1915.
Hassabis: “Training an AI system with a knowledge cutoff of 1911 and seeing if it could come up with general relativity like Einstein did in 1915. That’s the true test of whether we have a full AGI system.”
Current models can’t. They remix brilliantly. They don’t generate paradigm-shifting theories from first principles.
Hassabis: “I think we’re still a few years away from that.”
A few years. Not decades.
The system that can be Einstein once can be Einstein a thousand times simultaneously across every domain.
That’s not AGI anymore. That’s the beginning of something we don’t have words for yet.
When that test gets passed, we won’t need a press release to know what happened.