Demis Hassabis wants AI to do something no AI has ever done: think like Einstein. Not mimic Einstein. Not regurgitate Einstein’s papers. Actually replicate the kind of creative leap that produced general relativity, starting from scratch with only the information available before 1911.
The CEO of Google DeepMind has been refining what he considers the real benchmark for artificial general intelligence, and it’s far more demanding than anything the industry typically discusses.
The Einstein test, explained
Here’s the setup. You train an AI on all human knowledge up to a specific cutoff date, say 1901 or 1911. Then you ask it to derive something like special relativity (published in 1905) or general relativity (published in 1915). In English: could an AI, given only what scientists knew at the turn of the 20th century, make the same intuitive and creative leaps that Einstein made?
The answer, right now, is a resounding no.
