DeepMind, Google CEOs talk ‘every day’ amid ‘ferocious’ AI competition
Alphabet stocks started 2025 with investors questioning whether Google can keep up with ChatGPT maker OpenAI in the artificial intelligence race. By the end of the year, the stock had its best performance since 2009.
Google got its AI magic back. Most of these were mined from British company DeepMind, which Google bought for around £400 million in 2014.
In a wide-ranging interview for CNBC’s new podcast The Tech Download, DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis called it the “engine room” of Google’s AI efforts, adding that changes were being made to enable the tech giant to quickly launch AI products in a “wildly competitive environment.”
Hassabis said he speaks with Google CEO Sundar Pichai “every day,” underscoring how closely the two executives work to innovate quickly.
“All the AI technologies are being made by this group… and then it spreads across all these incredible products from Google,” Hassabis told The Tech Download, which launched on Friday.
“And we’ve been building that backbone for the last couple of years, meaning we’ve been designing not just the models, but the entire infrastructure of Google so that these things can be shipped incredibly quickly.”
This could be important for Google, as it faces another year of competition from OpenAI as well as a host of other players, from Amazon to Perplexity and Anthropic.
“It’s a fiercely competitive environment right now,” Hassabis said. He added that “many” veterans who have been in the tech industry “for 20, 30 years” have told him it’s “the most intense environment they’ve ever seen, maybe in the tech industry.”
Alphabet’s stock performance over the last 12 months.
Daily conversations with Sundar Pichai
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google was trying to catch up. Missteps in product, especially with AI tools in 2024, have reinforced the industry’s impression that Google is having a hard time competing.
Hassabis said the company’s problem is not inventing the technology. Transformers, an important architecture that forms the basis of large language models, was ultimately created by Google researchers. The company’s problem was “maybe it was a little bit slow to commercialize it and scale it,” Hassabis continued.
“This is what OpenAI and others have done very well,” he added.
“Over the last two, three years, I think we’ve almost had to go back to our startup or entrepreneurial roots, be more scrappy, be faster, ship things really quickly, and kind of make really rapid progress,” Hassabis said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd at Google’s annual I/O developers conference on May 20, 2025 in Mountain View, California.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
DeepMind’s CEO said the company was “getting into our groove” with the launch of Gemini 2.5 in March 2025. In November, Google released Gemini 3, which was widely praised by tech CEOs and users for its speed.
Hassabis said Gemini models developed in DeepMind can be sent very quickly to various Google products, such as search.
“This has been becoming a really seamless process over the last year or so, and I think you’ll see more of that over the next 12 months,” Hassabis said.
“We think about ourselves and we kind of define ourselves as the engine room for that.”
Hassabis added that he and Pichai “talk almost every day about strategic issues, where technology should go and what Google needs more broadly,” underscoring how integrated DeepMind is into Google’s broader plans and the pace at which the company hopes to innovate.
Hassabis said discussions with Pichai would lead to potential adjustments to roadmaps and plans “on a day-to-day basis,” yet with a long-term view of achieving artificial general intelligence, an AI considered as smart as humans, and the industry’s Holy Grail “primarily, quickly and safely.”
artificial intelligence bubble
As tech giants invest hundreds of billions of dollars in building AI infrastructure and their stocks continue to rise, market participants are debating whether the AI boom is a bubble. At the same time Venture capital money has been poured into AI startups with too many funds at high valuations and too few products.
Hassabis said some parts of the industry “may be in a bubble” while others probably aren’t.
“Artificial intelligence will be the most transformative technology ever invented,” he said. He compared it to the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s and early 2000s. “After all, the internet was critical and there were some generational companies that were established at that time,” Hassabis said. he said.
“It’s almost inevitable. There will be extreme euphoria once everyone realizes how transformative a particular technology is. Then there will be a reckoning, and then things that are real will survive and thrive.”
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis listens during a discussion at the artificial intelligence summit at Imperial College London in central London on July 9, 2025.
Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images
Hassabis said seed financing rounds in private markets are worth tens of billions of dollars, and in terms of products, “there’s almost nothing available yet” and “unsustainable in the long term.”
“Whichever way it goes, whether it’s rosy and exponential like it is right now or there’s some kind of bubble bursting, I’ve got to make sure we’re in the right position to win either way and benefit from it either way,” Hassabis said. he said.
“And given Google’s core business and how AI fits into that, I think we’re well positioned to benefit from whichever direction it goes from here.”
