Hassabis: All leading foundation models are poor at playing games
Demis Hassabis · Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough · Y Combinator · Apr 29, 2026 · at 14:11
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, discusses current AI reasoning paradigms and foundation model performance with Garry Tan.
0:00 / 0:03exact quote · 4.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“That all the leading foundation models are pretty poor at games, which is quite interesting.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Demis Hassabis
Hassabis predicts AGI will arrive around 2030
“Depending on what your AGI timeline is, You know, mine's like, 20, 30 or something like this.”
Hassabis: AI might solve a Millennium Prize math problem within years
“When I say just, we're now talking about just like solving the Riemann hypothesis or something. This would be obviously amazing. Well, one of the Millennium Prize problems, and maybe we're a couple of years out from doing that.”
Hassabis: Current AI paradigms will be part of final AGI architecture
“The components that you just mentioned, I'm pretty sure will be part of the final architecture for AGI. So I think they've come such a long way now and we've proven out so many things about what they can do. I can't see a world in which we will sort of realize…”
Hassabis: 50% chance AGI requires one or two new big ideas
“It could be that there's still one or two big ideas left that need to be cracked. I don't think it's more than one or two, if there are out there. And I think You know, my betting is about fifty-fifty if that's the case.”
Hassabis: Next few years of AI advances will come from RL and search
“And I think a lot of those ideas, both from AlphaGo and AlphaZero are really, really relevant to where we are with today's foundation models. And I think a lot of that is what we're going to see of the advances the next few years.”
Hassabis: Fixing AI reasoning gaps may only require one or two tweaks
“So there's just sort of huge gaps, I think, still, but it may only be one or two tweaks that are required to fix those kind of gaps, just to be clear, but I think that's pretty, pretty obvious there are there, and that's why you get this kind of jagged intelli…”