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Demis Hassabis: AI Will Be 10x Bigger and Faster Than the Industrial Revolution 🏭
How NYU Professor Fights Cheating with AI Oral Exams 🗣
Gina Acosta
January 04, 2026
In partnership with
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
AI is evolving faster than society can keep up. Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, talks about what he thinks is about to come, including why AI is shifting from chatbots to autonomous agents, how this could reshape science and the economy, and why the biggest challenge ahead may not be technology, but meaning.
Let’s jump right in!
Read Time: 4.5’ min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Chart of the week: Which Online Marketplaces Are Winning AI-Driven Traffic
NYU Professor Uses AI Oral Exams to Fight Cheating
AI Findings/Resources
AI tools to check out
Video of the week
TOGETHER WITH LEVANTA
The Future of Shopping? AI + Actual Humans.
AI has changed how consumers shop by speeding up research. But one thing hasn’t changed: shoppers still trust people more than AI.
Levanta’s new Affiliate 3.0 Consumer Report reveals a major shift in how shoppers blend AI tools with human influence. Consumers use AI to explore options, but when it comes time to buy, they still turn to creators, communities, and real experiences to validate their decisions.
The data shows:
Only 10% of shoppers buy through AI-recommended links
87% discover products through creators, blogs, or communities they trust
Human sources like reviews and creators rank higher in trust than AI recommendations
The most effective brands are combining AI discovery with authentic human influence to drive measurable conversions.
Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified by it.
Chart of the week
Which Online Marketplaces Are Winning AI-Driven Traffic
Amazon captured nearly 46% of AI-driven referral traffic, totaling about 11.9 million visits, due to its vast product catalog and strong brand presence.
Other large marketplaces like Walmart, Etsy, and eBay follow, but platforms like Costco Sam’s Club, Temu, and Zazzle see only marginal AI traffic, making up just 5% combined.
AI News
AI & EDUCATION
NYU Professor Uses AI Oral Exams to Fight Cheating
An NYU Stern professor replaced traditional written finals with AI-powered oral exams, uncovering gaps between student submissions and real understanding while cutting grading costs dramatically.
Details:
Professor Panos Ipeirotis noticed written assignments in his AI/ML Product Management course looked unrealistically polished, raising concerns about AI-assisted cheating.
Cold-calling students revealed many couldn’t explain basic decisions in their own work, suggesting written exams no longer reliably measure understanding.
To scale oral exams, Ipeirotis and co-instructor Konstantinos Rizakos used a voice AI agent built on ElevenLabs, with Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT forming a grading panel.
The exam tested students on their final projects and course case studies, averaging 25 minutes per student across 36 students.
Total cost was $15, or about 42 cents per student, compared to roughly $750 in human grading time.
Early versions had issues, including an intimidating tone, poor turn-taking, and biased “random” case selection, which were fixed through prompt and design tweaks.
Grading followed a “Council of LLMs” approach, improving consistency and producing detailed, structured feedback that outperformed human graders.
Results also exposed weaknesses in the course itself, particularly around experimentation and A/B testing, prompting teaching improvements.
Students found the AI oral exams more stressful than written tests, but most agreed they better measured real understanding. Ipeirotis has published the prompts for the voice agent and grading panel, along with a link to try the agent.
AI Findings/Resources
⚖️ Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn't go smoothly.
AI Tools to check out
👉 Vuepak: AI-powered multichannel outreach & smart delivery.
💼 Career Steer: Explore career paths that truly fit who you are and where you want to go.
✨ VidHex: Assembles audio expertise and various video optimization solutions, significantly revolutionizing your video workflow.
💥 Tasker AI: Build full-stack apps & websites by chatting with AI.
👀 11.ai: Build and customise your own AI voice assistant with unique names and voices.
Video of the week
Demis Hassabis: AI Will Be 10x Bigger and Faster Than the Industrial Revolution
Who is Demis Hassabis?
Demis Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind and a child chess prodigy turned neuroscientist. Unlike the "alarmists," he is an accelerationist with a conscience. His life's mission isn't just to build a chatbot, but to solve "root node" problems, using AI to crack the fundamental secrets of science (like nuclear fusion and disease) to unlock a new era for humanity.
⚠️ The Core Shift: From Chatbots to "Agents"
We are moving past the era of "passive" AI (you ask, it answers). Hassabis warns that the next 2-3 years will be defined by Agentic AI, systems that don't just talk, but act.
The Risk: He admits this is where safety gets tricky. We will soon have millions of autonomous agents roaming the internet doing tasks. DeepMind is already building "cyber defenses" to prepare for a world where these agents might go rogue or be used by bad actors.
The "Ferocious" Race: Hassabis describes the current competition as "10x more ferocious" than the Dot-com boom. Nation-states and companies are in a winner-takes-all sprint, making international cooperation difficult but critical.
The "Matrix" Strategy: World Models
Hassabis reveals his longest-standing passion: World Models.
Beyond Language: Text isn't enough. DeepMind is building AI that understands physics and 3D space, similar to a video game engine (like their "Genie" project).
The Simulation Game: The goal is to build accurate simulations of reality. If you can simulate a material or a biological cell perfectly, you can solve it without expensive real-world trial and error. This is how they plan to cure diseases and solve clean energy.
The Economic Upheaval
Hassabis draws a direct parallel to the Industrial Revolution, but predicts this shift will be 10x bigger and happen 10x faster.
The Post-Scarcity World: If AI solves fusion (infinite cheap energy) and robotics (cheap labor), the cost of living could collapse.
New Economic Systems: He argues that our current model (trading labor for money) won't survive. We may need to move beyond Universal Basic Income (UBI) to radical new systems, such as "direct democracy" where citizens use credits to vote on local resource allocation.
The Meaning Crisis: The biggest challenge might not be starvation, but purpose. In a world where work is optional, humanity will need to redefine what gives life meaning.
The Turing Bet
Hassabis is betting his life's work on the idea that everything in the universe is computable.
The Ultimate Limit: He believes there is no "magic" in the human brain that a machine cannot eventually replicate. If the brain is just information processing, then AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is inevitable.
The Timeline: He consistently sticks to a timeline of seeing AGI within the next decade, noting that we are currently "on track."
✅ What Needs to Happen
Responsible "Stewardship": Unlike the "pause" advocates, Hassabis believes we must push forward but with extreme caution. He views his role as "stewarding" AGI safely over the finish line.
International Cooperation: He hopes that as regular people start to feel the raw power of AI products in the next few years, public pressure will force governments to finally cooperate on safety standards.
The Bottom Line
We are living through the most profound technological shift in human history. While the short-term market might be in a "bubble," the long-term reality is underestimated. We are building a technology that will make the Industrial Revolution look like a minor adjustment.
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻