Alphabet shares began in 2025 with investors questioning whether Google could keep up with ChatGPT maker OpenAI in the AI race. At the end of the year, the fund reached its level The best performance since 2009.
Google has got its AI mojo back. Much of it was spun off from British company DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 for £400m.
In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC’s new podcast, The Tech Download, DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis called it the “engine room” of Google’s AI efforts and said changes were made to allow the tech giant to rapidly roll out AI products amid a “fiercely competitive environment.”
Hassabis said he speaks with Google CEO Sundar Pichai “on a daily basis,” noting how closely the two executives work to drive rapid innovation.
“All the AI technology is created by this group … and then it’s distributed directly through Google to all these great products,” Hassabis told The Tech Download, which launched on Friday.
“Over the last couple of years, we’ve been building that foundation, so not just the models, but also … architecting the entire Google infrastructure so that … these things are delivered very quickly.”
This could be key 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 now,” Hassabis said. He added “many” veterans who have been in tech for “20, 30 years” told him “it’s the most intense environment they’ve ever been in, maybe they’ve seen in the tech industry.”
Alphabet stock performance over the past 12 months.
Daily calls with Sundar Pichai
Made by Google in 2023 a major change for integration its Google Brain research unit with DeepMind, a move that laid the foundation for the company’s success with its AI assistant Gemini. Other key shifts, e.g promoting executive Josh Woodward He played his part to lead the twins.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google tried to catch up. The product makes mistakes with its AI tools Along the way, especially in 2024, Google has reinforced the industry’s impression that it is trying to compete.
Hassabis said the company’s challenge is not to invent technology. The basic architecture underlying transformers, a large language pattern, was developed by Google researchers. The problem with the company is that “it may be a little slow to commercialize and scale,” Hassabis continued.
“This is what OpenAI and others have done very well,” he added.
“In the last two, three years, I think we almost had to go back to our startup or entrepreneurial roots and we had to be faster, we had to be faster, we had to ship things really fast and make really fast progress,” Hassabis said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd at Google’s annual I/O developer conference on May 20, 2025 in Mountain View, California.
Camilla Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
DeepMind’s CEO said the company is “in our minds” with the launch of Gemini 2.5 in March 2025. in november Google launched Gemini 3it has been praised by technology CEOs and users for its speed.
Hassabis said that the Gemini models being developed at DeepMind could very quickly be sent to various Google products, such as search.
“It’s becoming a really smooth process over the last year, and I think you’re going to see that in the next 12 months,” Hassabis said.
“We think of ourselves and describe ourselves as the engine room for that.”
Hassabis added that he and Pichai “talk a lot every day about strategic things and where the technology needs to go and what Google needs more broadly,” noting how integral DeepMind is to Google’s broader plans and the company’s hoped-for pace of innovation.
Hassabis said the conversation with Pichai will lead to potential adjustments to roadmaps and plans “on a daily basis,” still with a long-term vision of achieving artificial general intelligence, AI considered as intelligent as humans, and the industry’s Holy Grail of “first, fast and secure.”
The AI bubble
As tech giants commit hundreds of billions to building AI infrastructure and their stakes grow, market participants have debated whether the AI boom is a bubble. At the same time, Venture capital poured into AI startups with lots of fundraising with high prices and low output.
Hassabis said some parts of the industry “may be in a bubble” while others are not.
“AI 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. “At the end of the day, the Internet was very important, and there were several generational companies that were created at that time,” Hassabis said.
“It’s almost inevitable. Once everyone realizes how transformative a certain technology is, there’s going to be overkill. Then there’s a reckoning, and then the real stuff survives and thrives.”
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis listens during a panel discussion at the AI Summit at Imperial College in central London on July 9, 2025.
Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images
Hassabis said seed funding rounds in the private markets have been valued at tens of billions of dollars, where there is “nothing yet” about the product that is “unsustainable in the long term.”
“I have to make sure that whatever way it goes, whether it continues to be rosy and exponential like it is now, or whether some bubble is bursting, we’re in the right position to win either way and take advantage of this opportunity,” Hassabis said.
“I think we’re well-positioned to benefit from this, whichever way it goes, given Google’s core business and how AI fits into that.”