I don’t like celebrities.
My mom always saw me too excited in front of MTV, watching video clips of The Arctic Monkeys, and kept repeating, “You know… they poop just like you.”
And my mom is right (moms are always right).
So I end up never glorifying people. They are just people.
But there is a small list of them I wish to meet very much:
Ilya Sutskever, the previous OpenAI cofounder who made GPT possible.
Steven Pressfield, the author who gave creators a battle plan against resistance and procrastination. You guys should read ‘The War of Art’.
Andrej Karpathy, the previous OpenAI researcher who shaped early GPT models. Also, a fantastic educator. By the way, he just joined Anthropic (Claude).
Rick Rubin, who strips creativity down to its raw essence.
Robert Greene, who decoded power, influence, and human nature.
And then there is Demis Hassabis.
A Nobel Prize winner. Founder of Google DeepMind. A living legend of AI.
I just met Demis.
Shaking hands with the man building AGI.
So, I was at Google I/O on Wednesday, the 20th of May.
And you will quickly understand why it matters to you (too).
We talked for a couple of minutes about the future of work & AI.
If you have never heard of him, you need a quick recap.
Age 4: started playing chess.
Age 13: reached master level in chess. That’s very high.
Age 17: helped create the video game Theme Park. A simulation.
Early 20s: studied computer science at Cambridge + a PhD in neuroscience.
Age 22: founded Elixir Studios, a video game company.
Age 34: co-founded DeepMind in 2010.
Age 37: DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for 600 million pounds. It’s considered the best and cheapest acquisition of all time, in history.
Age 39: led DeepMind when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go, the very best gamer of Go in the world, a game with about 10¹⁷⁰ possible board configurations, more than the number of atoms in the known universe.
Age 44: DeepMind released AlphaFold, used for predicting protein structures.
Age 48: won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold.
And today, Demis is one of the handful of people building AGI (AGI = Artificial General Intelligence, when the machine becomes smarter than us, humans).
DeepMind has a simple mission: "solve intelligence, then use that to solve everything else." And Demis told me AGI - also called Singularity - is 4 years away from us.
Here’s what it means for your job over the next 4 years.
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AGI is 4 years away.
Demis has been saying it for years. AGI by 2030. Maximum.
That’s what he believes. That’s what he’s actively building. And maximum means it could land earlier. Yes, I wrote 4 years. Not 40.
If he’s right, the work you do today looks almost nothing like the work you’ll be paid for in 2030. If he’s wrong, you have a few more years to get ready.
Either way, the move is the same.
And if you are wondering what I mean by “the future of work”, I want to take my dad as an example.
My dad’s marketing job (before spreadsheets).
My dad worked in marketing in the 1980s.
And I studied marketing from 2017 to 2022 (but dropped out, sorry, dad).
Needless to say, his marketing and my marketing have NOTHING in common.
My dad did hardcore marketing. Before spreadsheets. Before Google Forms. Before dashboards. Before any of the screens you’re using right now to do the same job. His job looked more like this:
Walk into the street. Stop strangers. Ask them what they thought of a product.
Write the answers in a notebook. Type them up later. Build the report.
By typing them up, I don’t mean on a computer. I mean, on paper, of course.
Draw mathematical functions by hand. BY HAND. With a pencil & compass.
Walk it to the meeting. Present it to people, humans, in actual chairs.
Marketing was a physical job. A social job.
Then the screens arrived.
Spreadsheets. Google Forms. Looker. Tableau. Notion. Slack. Social media. Google Ads. The job wasn’t social. Got more analytical. Got faster. Got lonelier.
And now AI is taking that screen-work away.
The first draft. The summary. The market scan. The campaign brief. The deck outline. The Tuesday morning emails.
As per Demis own words, “Maybe we were not supposed to be watching a screen so much?” And I agreed.
That was - by far - the most touching moment of our discussion. I could see a very human researcher, hoping to build good for humanity, and wanting to solve the world’s best problem while making us more human.
I laughed - and you can see me laugh on the 30-second video - and said: “Somehow AI will push us to be more human than?” To which he replied, smiling, “Wouldn’t that be a nice future?”
So what’s left is what was always the real job. People.
The same place my dad started in the 1980’s.
Your job in 2030 will look more like my dad’s job in 1984 than it does today.
I asked Demis. And Demis agreed.
I only pay my lawyer because I’d love to have lunch with him.
“Why am I paying my lawyer?”
He’s expensive. He drafts contracts. He flags risks. He sends me documents I sign too quickly.
If that was the whole job, I’d be using AI.
AI drafts contracts now. AI flags risks now. The output is fine. Sometimes good. Sometimes better than the junior associate he might hire next year. Especially with next year's levels of AI (imagine Claude-6, or ChatGPT-7).
But I still pay him. A lot. Why?
Because I want to have lunch with him.
I’m serious.
When he calls, I pick up. He has great insights, is nerdy about the media business, and makes my days easier. I want to team up with him. He’s fun to win with.
Contract is the floor, the minimum pricing. But our relationship is the ceiling.
And the ceiling is what costs me a lot of dollars per hour.
Now substitute your job:
I pay my accountant because she remembers my mother’s name.
I pay my designer because we have shipped hundreds of projects together, and she pushes back on me. Sometimes at 9 pm. Sometimes at 7 am. She cares.
I pay my consultant because he said no to becoming my CMO. He told me, “You don’t need marketing help, stop searching”. My AI does not say ‘no’ to me.
I pay my doctor because he remembers my back injury as if he can feel it.
The deliverable is the floor. You are the ceiling.
You, the human, the one with soft skills connecting with others.
→ If you stay on the surface level, the deliverable, AI will replace you in 4 years.
→ Become the ceiling, connect with others, be closer to the people you serve, and you get paid more than you’ve ever been paid in your life.
That’s the biggest takeaway from my conversation with Demis:
AI will absorb the need for most people to be in front of a computer.
Focusing on human interactions seems the most profitable way forward.
Taste & judgment are the only competitive advantages left. Sharp them.
But if you want a glimpse of the future, it’s called agent orchestration.
The other path: agent orchestration.
I will be direct: most, if not everyone reading this shouldn’t be doing this.
Agent orchestration, or managing a swarm of AI agents to do the work.
In simpler terms, imagine an army of Claudes and ChatGPTs that can make decisions and do the work. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week.
Not today’s Claudes and ChatGPTs, but imagine the 2030 version of it.
I don’t know why people are obsessing over being Jarvis and controlling this swarm of “agents”. But I think - like Demis - that only a fraction of people will do it. And they won’t necessarily be the richest people around (or the happiest).
Just to be clear, what does it mean today to “orchestrate” agents?
You build a system of AIs that talk to each other. One agent does the research. Another writes the draft. Another sends the email. Another schedules the follow-up. You sit in the middle, like Iron Man with Jarvis in your ear.
Agent orchestration works. But it also takes weeks to set up, requires you to think like an engineer, and is mostly for the developer world.
That’s why I never write guides on “Agents” or “Automation”. It’s not there yet. But Demis told me, and knows, it will eventually become the norm.
But if you’re a knowledge worker in your 40s with a real job, a real calendar, and a real family, this is not where to spend your next 4 years. Developers will build the orchestration. You’ll use what they build, exactly like you use Excel today, without knowing how Excel was made.
Your premium move is somewhere else.
And Demis told me how to build your human premium today:
Physical. Intelligence. Taste.
Physical labor is fixed. Intelligence is fixed.
Taste is the only human skill left.
Some say you can algorithmically produce taste.
I prefer to believe AI can hardly - very hardly - be tasteful.
AI can’t take responsibility for you. It’s not calling the shot.
The call to ship or kill. The call to hire her or pass. The call to bet on the deal or walk away. The call to send the email or sleep on it.
AI gives you 30 options in 30 seconds. Taste picks the one. Judgment knows when picking is wrong.
Let’s take our Nobel Prize winner, Demis.
Demis built DeepMind because he saw something in 2010 that the smartest people in the world didn’t see. He bet 16 years on it. They called him crazy:
But the bet paid: AlphaGo, AlphaFold, Nobel Prize.
That’s taste. That’s judgment.
You build them by doing the work. Years of bad calls. Awkward meetings. Failed launches. Clients who ghosted. Hires who didn’t work out. Projects that died.
AI has read about those things. You lived them.
That tiny little gap is your salary in 2030.
Pick up the phone. Show up in person. Remember the name. Push back. Take the long lunch. Make the hard call. Take responsibility when the work goes wrong.
Be more human to get paid a (massive) premium.
Do the things AI can’t do, because AI doesn’t have a body (yet????).
In 4 years, the average knowledge worker will be replaced by a subscription.
The premium knowledge worker is paid more than they have ever been paid in their life, because they’re the only thing in the room that’s still real.
Be that person we want to have lunch with.
Am I paid by Google?
No.
They invited me to I/O, no strings attached.
Because I simply cannot take money from AI labs.
99% of my work is for free - shared to millions of people across social media.
And 99% of my work is about AI labs, like Google & Gemini, OpenAI & ChatGPT, or Anthropic & Claude. As I want millions of people to have a single source of truth when it comes to AI labs, I cannot take money from them.
So how do I keep giving for free?
By 2030, I believe 5 million humans will read my newsletter, for free. This newsletter will remain free to help you stay focused on how to use AI.
By 2030, I believe 50,000 of them (1%) will pay for my Substack. They join my Circle community, so AI isn’t such a lonely experience. I connect with them.
By 2030, I believe 500 of them (1% of 1%) will be my consulting clients - enterprises in the US - so I can help them accelerate their AI adoption.
In other words…
You can do it by yourself for free.
You can do it with you by paying for my Substack.
Or I can do it for you, with my team, by messaging me on Linkedin.
I don’t care about Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, or any other model.
I don’t pick sides. I’m not paid to make this newsletter.
I’m sharing, twice a week, how my work is transforming (very fast) with AI.
As I’m trying to keep up, I want you to keep up. So we move just as fast.
I want to be the greatest filter to the AI noise. And 600,000+ people read this twice a week to focus on the How. Some came because of my LinkedIn. But most readers subscribed because someone they trusted sent one of my articles to them.
If this article helped you, be that person for someone else (and share it):
It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring :)
If someone did send you this, thank them and subscribe for free here:
absolute banger of a post.
The interesting part about moments like this is rarely the status, it’s the perspective shift that happens from being close to exceptional people.