Shane Legg: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023 - TIME

Sep 07, 2023

# Shane Legg

Co-Founder and Chief AGI Scientist, Google DeepMind

by

[Will Henshall](https://time.com/author/will-henshall/)

![](https://gcp-na-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9f5f14d033a8e562/698a400edb2987448b2694db/Legg.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=4:5)

Illustration by TIME; reference image courtesy of Shane Legg

When Shane Legg, co-founder of top AI lab DeepMind, interviews job applicants, he wants to make sure they know what they are getting into. Lila Ibrahim, chief operating officer at DeepMind, tells TIME that conversations with Legg led her to worry about the future for her kids, given the risks involved with the technologies the company is developing.

Legg was DeepMind’s chief scientist since its founding and became chief AGI scientist after DeepMind merged with Google Brain in April to form Google DeepMind. He says he would often talk explicitly about how soon artificial general intelligence (AGI)—an AI that can do practically any cognitive task a human can do—could arrive and the risks that AGI could pose, to “see how they react to it. Because a lot of people found that sort of thing completely bonkers. I wanted to see how comfortable they were in thinking about things that were beyond what was currently state of the art … I thought that was an important quality.”

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Today a lot of others are coming around to the thinking that has preoccupied Legg for more than two decades. In 2011, in an [interview](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/No5JpRCHzBrWA4jmS/q-and-a-with-shane-legg-on-risks-from-ai "undefined") on blogging site LessWrong, he estimated that there was a 50% chance that human-level machine intelligence would be created by 2028. Legg tells TIME he [actually made](https://www.vetta.org/2010/12/goodbye-2010/ "undefined") this prediction more than two decades ago while working as a software engineer, after reading _The Age of Spiritual Machines_ by Ray Kurzweil, and that he has yet to change his mind. Until quite recently, his predictions were dismissed by most AI researchers, including the Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. But both of them abruptly changed their minds on the issue earlier this year, and predict (with great trepidation) that human-level AI will be developed in the next five to 20 years. “Both of them thought I was pretty crazy having that prediction,” Legg, 49, says. “And now neither of them think that prediction is crazy.”

Legg took his own prediction seriously enough that he decided to return to university to learn more about AI—in 2003, he started a Ph.D. at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Lugano, Switzerland, and won a notable prize for his thesis, titled [“Machine Super Intelligence.”](http://www.vetta.org/documents/Machine_Super_Intelligence.pdf "undefined") (Legg eventually recruited his supervisor, Marcus Hutter, to join DeepMind as a senior research scientist in 201

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