Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has revealed what tech industry veterans think about the current AI competition. In a recent interview, DeepMind’s founder and CEO said that industry veterans have described the current AI competition as “the most intense environment they’ve ever seen, perhaps ever in the technology industry.”During a recent interview on CNBC’s new podcast, The Tech Download, Hassabis said, “Many” executives who’d been in tech for “20, 30 years” had shared this assessment as Google faces competition from OpenAI, Amazon, Perplexity, Anthropic, and others.“It’s a ferocious competitive environment at the moment,” Hassabis said, calling DeepMind “the engine room” of Google’s AI efforts. The UK company, which Google acquired in 2014 for around £400 million, has driven changes enabling the tech giant to rapidly roll out AI products.This comes after Alphabet shares rebounded in 2025 as investors started questioning whether Google could keep pace with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, with the stock notching its best performance since 2009 by year’s end.
What Demis Hassabis said about OpenAI’s competition with Google
In November 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Google was playing catch-up. Product missteps with its AI tools, particularly in 2024, reinforced the industry’s perception that Google was struggling to compete.Hassabis said the company’s issue wasn’t inventing tech. Transformers, a key architecture underpinning large language models (LLMs), were developed by Google researchers. The company’s issue was “maybe” that it was “a little bit slow to commercialise it and scale it,” Hassabis continued.“That’s what OpenAI and others did very well. The last two, three years, I think we’ve had to come back to almost our startup or entrepreneurial roots and be scrappier, be faster, ship things really quickly and sort of make really rapid progress,” Hassabis explained.Talking about Google’s catch-up, Hassabis said that the company “got into our groove” with the launch of Gemini 2.5 in March 2025. In November 2025, Google launched Gemini 3, which was praised by tech CEOs and users for its speed. Hassabis said the Gemini models being developed at DeepMind can be shipped across various Google products, such as search, very quickly.“For the last sort of year, that’s becoming really a smooth process now, and I think you’ll see that more over the next 12 months. We think of ourselves and describe ourselves sort of as the engine room for that,” he added.Hassabis added that he and Pichai “pretty much talk every day about strategic things and where should the technology go, and what does the wider Google need,” highlighting how integral DeepMind is to Google’s wider plans and the pace the company is hoping to innovate.Hassabis said the conversations with Pichai will lead to potential adjustments of roadmaps and plans “on a daily basis,” still with the longer-term view of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI deemed as intelligent as humans and the goal of the industry, “first, fast and safely.”
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