Demis Hassabis Proposes Definitive AGI Test: Could AI Discover General Relativity?

The Einstein Test: A Concrete Benchmark for AGI

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has proposed a compelling and specific test for determining whether a true AGI has been achieved, sparking intense discussion across the AI research community.

In a YouTube interview, Hassabis described his vision: "The kind of test I would be looking for is training an AI system with a knowledge cutoff of, say, 1911, and then seeing if it could come up with general relativity, like Einstein did in 1915. That's the kind of test I think is a true test of whether we have a full AGI system."

Why This Test Matters

The power of this proposal lies in what it measures: not memorization or pattern recognition, but genuine scientific reasoning and creative discovery. General relativity required Einstein to synthesize existing mathematical tools and physical observations into an entirely new conceptual framework — something that goes far beyond recombining known information.

Physics available by 1911: Newtonian mechanics, special relativity (1905), electromagnetism

Einstein's 1915 achievement: Unifying gravity with spacetime curvature via the equivalence principle

Required capability: Paradigm-breaking conceptual innovation

The Gap Between Current LLMs and AGI

While today's large language models excel at synthesizing and explaining existing concepts, their ability to independently construct fundamentally new physical theories remains unproven. Hassabis's test crystallizes this distinction sharply.

The comment earned over 2,800 upvotes on r/singularity, catalyzing deeper discussion about what the ultimate goal of AI research really is — and how far current systems remain from achieving it.

Competing Definitions of AGI

Hassabis's proposal also highlights the diversity of AGI definitions. While OpenAI defines AGI as a system capable of performing "most economically valuable tasks," Hassabis sets a far more rigorous bar: the ability to make genuine scientific discoveries. This distinction matters enormously for how we measure and evaluate progress in AI development.