Alphabet’s stock has seen a remarkable turnaround, beginning 2025 with investor concerns about its standing against competitors like OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. By the close of the year, the tech giant’s shares had achieved their strongest performance since 2009, signaling a resurgence in its artificial intelligence capabilities.
Much of this AI revival can be attributed to DeepMind, the UK-based artificial intelligence research laboratory acquired by Google in 2014 for approximately £400 million. Demis Hassabis, founder and CEO of DeepMind, described the company as the “engine room” of Google’s AI endeavors in a recent interview for CNBC’s “The Tech Download” podcast. He highlighted strategic adjustments made to accelerate the rollout of AI products in a highly competitive landscape.
Hassabis revealed a close working relationship with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, stating they communicate daily to drive innovation at an accelerated pace. “All the AI technologies are done by this group… and then it’s diffused across all of these incredible products right across Google,” Hassabis explained. He elaborated on the critical infrastructure development over the past couple of years, which not only includes advanced models but also a robust architecture designed for rapid product deployment.
This strategic focus is paramount for Google as it navigates another year of intense competition from not only OpenAI but also a growing field of players including Amazon, Perplexity, and Anthropic. Hassabis characterized the current environment as “ferocious,” noting that many industry veterans with decades of experience have described it as the most intense period they have ever witnessed in the technology sector.
The integration of Google Brain with DeepMind in 2023 was a pivotal move, laying the groundwork for the successful development of Gemini, Google’s flagship AI assistant. Further strategic appointments, such as elevating Josh Woodward to lead the Gemini initiative, have also been instrumental.
Following the disruptive launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, Google found itself playing catch-up. Initial product missteps with its AI tools, particularly in 2024, fueled perceptions of the company struggling to keep pace. Hassabis acknowledged that Google’s challenge was not in technological invention—its researchers were, after all, behind the groundbreaking Transformer architecture that powers many large language models—but rather in the speed of commercialization and scaling. He noted that OpenAI and others had excelled in this area.
“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 stated. He observed that the company found its stride with the launch of Gemini 2.5 in March 2025, followed by the highly acclaimed Gemini 3 in November, which garnered praise for its speed from industry leaders and users alike.
Hassabis emphasized that Gemini models developed at DeepMind are now being seamlessly integrated across various Google products, including search, with increasing efficiency. “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,” he commented, reinforcing DeepMind’s role as the core development hub.
The daily strategic discussions between Hassabis and Pichai are crucial for adapting roadmaps and plans, with the overarching goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI with human-like cognitive abilities—”first, fast and safely.”
**Navigating the AI Landscape: Bubble or Boom?**
As major tech companies invest heavily in AI infrastructure, driving significant stock growth, the debate continues regarding whether the current AI surge constitutes a bubble. Simultaneously, venture capital continues to flow into AI startups, many of which are securing substantial funding at high valuations with nascent products.
Hassabis offered a nuanced perspective, suggesting that while some segments of the industry might be experiencing bubble-like conditions, others are not. He underscored AI’s potential as the “most transformative technology ever invented,” drawing a parallel to the dot-com era. “In the end, the internet was critical, and there were some generational companies that were created during that time,” he noted, adding that overexuberance is a natural precursor to significant technological shifts, followed by a period of consolidation where genuine innovations prevail.
He pointed to seed funding rounds in private markets, valued in the tens of billions with little demonstrable product, as unsustainable. “I’ve got to make sure that whichever way it goes, whether it continues to go all rosy and exponential, like it is now, or there’s … some kind of bubble bursting, that we’re in the right position to win either way, and to take advantage of that either way,” Hassabis concluded. He expressed confidence in Google’s positioning, given its robust underlying business and the synergistic integration of AI, to benefit regardless of the market’s trajectory.
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