We study the question on whether the famous Golod-Shafarevich estimate, which gives a lower bound for the Hilbert series of a (noncommutative) algebra, is attained. This question was considered by Anick in his 1983 paper 'Generic algebras and CWcomplexes', Princeton Univ. Press., where he proved that the estimate is attained for the number of quadratic relations d 2 , and conjectured that it is the case for any number of quadratic relations. The particular point where the number of relations is equal to n(n−1) 2 was addressed by Vershik. He conjectured that a generic algebra with this number of relations is finite dimensional.We prove that over any infinite field, the Anick conjecture holds for d 4(n 2 +n) 9and arbitrary number of generators, and confirm the Vershik conjecture over any field of characteristic 0. We give also a series of related asymptotic results.