Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis's Q&A With Big Technology on AI and Google's Future
Google's most important AI leader on translating research to products, the future of agents, and plenty more.
Last week, I profiled Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, the Google executive driving the company’s AI strategy.
Hassabis is an AI research maverick now tasked with helping Google improve its core products with his groundbreaking models. In our conversation, he shared some facinating thoughts about how to go about it, and where AI is heading more broadly.
Here’s the interview I conducted with Hassabis, edited lightly for length and clarity, available in full to Big Technology subscribers. Upgrade today at 20% off for full access.
What's your remit at Google today?
It's growing all the time. Partly because the AI field is growing. The big merger that happened between Google Brain and DeepMind is going really well. That's how I occupied a lot of my last year.
That merger happened partly because the projects we're working on these days — including Gemini — are massive in terms of personnel, compute, and organizations. So it makes sense to combine.
We also feel collectively that AI is ready for primetime in terms of products — powering pretty much all things at Google — but also new experiences. So that's a new phase we're in with AI, and it requires a different setup from the much more exploratory phases we had 5, 10 years ago, where it was more pure research.
Are you sitting in product meetings?