Welcome to a 'profound moment for humanity,' according to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who closed out Google I/O's keynote presentation on Tuesday by announcing that we are standing in the 'foothills of the singularity.' This is the same guy who told Bloomberg just a few months ago that 'we're nowhere near that' and that we have a '50 percent chance of getting there by 2030.' So either he's been hiking really fast, or the definition of 'foothills' has gotten a lot more generous.
Just before dropping the singularity bomb, Hassabis introduced Gemini for Science, a set of tools and experiments in Google Labs and Google Antigravity designed to help with scientific research. With these tools, Google hopes to 'reimagine drug discovery with the goal of one day solving all disease.' Because nothing says 'solving all disease' like a press release at a developer conference. Tech executives love this kind of talk - Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls AI a 'cognitive amplifier tool,' and Luma AI CEO Amit Jain claimed last year that AI is the key to saving Hollywood. If AI saves both science and cinema, we might just run out of problems.
Hassabis's definition of 'singularity' is also a bit of a moving target. He told Bloomberg that 'the singularity is another word for a full AGI arriving,' which is not quite what Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil had in mind. But hey, when you're standing in the foothills, you can redefine the mountain however you like.