Demis Hassabis Thinks AI Job Cuts Are Dumb
The CEO of Google DeepMind tells WIRED that companies should use the productivity gains of AI to do more, not lay people off.
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind , is keen to talk about the coding skills of his company’s newest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. The model has been trained to perform complex agentic coding tasks: translate large code bases from one language to another; find and fix bugs lurking deep in knotty code; and even write entire operating systems from scratch.
Hassabis does not, however, think this spells doom for software developers. “I have no idea why people are going around talking with certainty about that,” Hassabis tells WIRED ahead of the new model reveal at today’s Google’s I/O event .
“Perhaps there is an ulterior motive for putting those messages out; raising money or whatever,” Hassabis says. “From my point of view, from DeepMind and Google's point of view, if engineers are becoming three or four times more productive, then we just [want to] do three or four times more stuff.”
The striking coding abilities of the latest models has led to widespread fear that AI may be on the brink of eliminating programming roles and other white-collar jobs. Executives at some AI companies have predicted widespread job displacement, while some prominent tech companies, including Amazon , Salesforce , and Block , have blamed recent layoffs on the use of AI.
Hassabis thinks that Alphabet, which oversees several companies besides Google, may be well positioned to take advantage of a revolution in software productivity. “I have a million ideas, from lab drug discovery to game design,” he says. “I'd love to have some free engineers to go and do those kinds of things.”
Hassabis says that companies looking to replace developers with AI may be making a big mistake. “I think it's a lack of imagination—and a lack of understanding of what's really going to happen,” he says.
