DeepMind, Google CEOs talk ‘every day’ amid ‘ferocious’ AI competition

Alphabet shares started 2025 with investors questioning whether Google could keep up with ChatGPT maker OpenAI in the AI race. By year’s end, the stock had notched its best performance since 2009.

Google got its AI mojo back. Much of that was driven out of DeepMind, the British company Google acquired in 2014 for around £400 million.

In a wide-ranging interview for CNBC’s new podcast, The Tech Download, DeepMind’s founder and CEO Demis Hassabis called it “the engine room” of Google’s AI efforts, adding that changes had been made to enable the tech giant to rapidly roll out AI products amid a “ferocious competitive environment.”

Hassabis said he talks to Google CEO Sundar Pichai “every day,” underscoring how close the two executives are working to innovate quickly.

“All the AI technologies is done by this group … and then it’s diffused across all of these incredible products right across Google,” Hassabis told The Tech Download, which launched on Friday.

“And the last couple of years, we’ve been building that backbone, so not just the models, but also … architecting the entire infrastructure of Google so that … these things can ship incredibly quickly.”

This could be key for Google as it faces another year of competition from OpenAI as well as a plethora of other players from Amazon to Perplexity and Anthropic.

“It’s a ferocious competitive environment at the moment,” Hassabis said. He added “many” veterans who’d been in tech for “20, 30 years,” had told him this was “the most intense environment they’ve ever seen, perhaps ever in the technology industry.”

In 2023, Google made a key change to combine its Google Brain research division with DeepMind, a move that laid the foundation for its success with the company’s flagship AI assistant Gemini. Other key shifts, such as promoting executive Josh Woodward to run Gemini, played their part.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google was playing catch-up. Product missteps with its AI tools along the way, particularly in 2024, reinforced the industry’s impression that Google was struggling to compete.

Hassabis said the company’s issue wasn’t inventing tech. Transformers, a key architecture that underpins large language models, were created by Google researchers after all. The company’s issue was “maybe” that it was “a little bit slow to commercialize it and scale it,” Hassabis continued.

“That’s what OpenAI and others did very well,” he added.

“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 said.

The DeepMind CEO said the…