Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says his AI lab clawed its method again to the frontier over the previous two to 3 years by doing one thing counterintuitive for a unit inside a $2 trillion firm—performing like a startup. Talking on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings, Hassabis described a deliberate cultural and structural reset after the 2023 merger of DeepMind and Google Mind, one which gave the lab unified entry to Google’s compute infrastructure and compelled it to ship sooner in what he referred to as probably the most “ferocious” aggressive atmosphere veteran staff had ever seen.
Google mixed fragmented AI groups and compute right into a single push
The core of the shift, Hassabis defined, was consolidation. Earlier than the merger, Google had a number of groups constructing overlapping fashions with separate sources. “We have principally helped put collectively all of the expertise from across the firm, type of pushing in a single path,” he mentioned on the podcast. That meant one mannequin effort as an alternative of two or three, and—critically—entry to compute at a scale DeepMind hadn’t beforehand loved. Alphabet spent $91.4 billion on capex in 2025 and has guided for as much as $185 billion in 2026, with provide constraints, not money, described because the bottleneck.
Hassabis claims 90% of recent AI’s foundations got here from Google and DeepMind
In one of many podcast’s extra pointed moments, Hassabis mentioned roughly 90% of the breakthroughs underpinning at the moment’s AI trade got here from Google Mind, Google Analysis, or DeepMind. The transformer structure, reinforcement studying from human suggestions, and AlphaFold—which received Hassabis a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024—all hint again to these labs. Whether or not the 90% determine holds as much as scrutiny is debatable, however the tutorial file does again a considerable share.
The startup playbook is now a survival technique, not a branding train
Hassabis framed the cultural shift as existential, not aspirational. “Appearing nearly like a startup, actually, to get again to the frontier,” he mentioned. And there is proof it is working—Gemini crossed roughly 750 million month-to-month energetic customers by the top of This autumn 2025. However the aggressive window is not widening. OpenAI’s aggressive push into enterprise and shopper merchandise, Anthropic’s quickly scaling income, and the sheer tempo of mannequin releases throughout the trade imply Google cannot coast on legacy contributions. For a lab that helped invent trendy AI, the irony is sharp: the one technique to keep forward is to run prefer it’s 2010 once more.
