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🧠 The Signal People Didn’t Expect
This week, Shane Legg, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Google DeepMind, publicly posted that he’s hiring a Chief AGI Economist to study post-AGI economics.
Not “future AI impact.”
Not “long-term speculation.”
Post-AGI.
That wording is deliberate.
Shane Legg @ Google Deepmind
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🌎 🚨 Why This Matters
Deepmind Co-Founder: Shane Legg
Companies talk.
Executives speculate.
But org design tells the truth.
Hiring a senior economist to study post-AGI economics means:
AGI is no longer treated as hypothetical
The transition is considered close enough to plan for
The concern has shifted from “can we build it?” to “what happens after?”
You don’t staff for this unless the timeline feels real internally.
China AI
🌏 Meanwhile, China Made Its Own Move
Ernie 5 Benchmarks
At nearly the same time, Baidu shipped ERNIE 5, explicitly framing it as a step toward general intelligence — not just task-specific AI.
This wasn’t positioned as:
a chatbot upgrade
a narrow model refresh
a feature bundle
It was framed as capability convergence.
Different lab.
Different country.
Same direction.
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What Does This Indicate?
🧩 Put the Pieces Together
Individually, these events are easy to downplay.
Together, they form a pattern:
DeepMind is planning for post-AGI economics
Baidu is shipping models framed around general intelligence
Less focus on demos, more focus on consequences
Less “if”, more “when”
This is not how labs behave when AGI is decades away.
TOOLS
⏱️ What This Says About Timelines
No one is giving a date.
That’s not how this phase works.
Instead, labs are:
reorganizing internally
hiring for second-order effects
shifting from research posture → transition posture
That’s what happens when the uncertainty window narrows.
🧠 This Is the Quiet Phase
AGI won’t arrive with fireworks.
It will arrive like this:
quiet hires
careful wording
subtle shifts in priorities
planning for economic impact before public confirmation
By the time it’s obvious, the preparation phase will already be over.
Bottom Line
When Google’s AGI leadership starts planning for a post-AGI economy — and China ships models framed around general intelligence — it’s no longer speculation.
It’s preparation.
AGI may not be here tomorrow.
But the people closest to it are clearly getting ready for the world after it arrives.
And that’s the real signal.