In a candid reflection on Google’s AI strategy, Demis Hassabis said the company rebuilt its competitive position by operating like a startup within a tech giant.
Speaking on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings, Hassabis highlighted a major shift following the 2023 merger of DeepMind and Google Brain.
The merger brought together fragmented AI teams and resources into a single unified effort. “We’ve basically helped put together all the talent from around the company, sort of pushing in one direction,” he said. This consolidation allowed teams to focus on a single model strategy while gaining access to significantly larger computing power.
The restructuring also aligned with heavy investments by Alphabet, which spent $91.4 billion in capital expenditure in 2025 and is guiding up to $185 billion in 2026, with supply constraints emerging as a key challenge.
Hassabis noted that this transformation was essential in what he described as the most “ferocious” competitive environment the company has faced. He claimed that nearly 90% of the foundational breakthroughs in modern AI, such as transformer architectures, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and AlphaFold, originated from Google’s AI ecosystem.
The shift to a faster, startup-like culture appears to be delivering results. Gemini reached around 750 million monthly active users by the end of Q4 2025.
However, competition remains intense. Rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic are rapidly expanding across enterprise and consumer markets, while the pace of AI model development continues to accelerate.
Hassabis emphasised that maintaining leadership requires continuous reinvention. For a company that helped shape modern AI, he suggested the path forward lies in rediscovering the agility and urgency of its early days.
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