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.”
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I agree. I also think that the only thing we forget sometimes is that in many software houses, mediocrity is the business model: make money from change orders. Hook em for cheap, realize the bare minimum acceptance pass, sell that 15y expensive support contract and changes are time & material.
I despise the model but it's fairly common, especially on contracts awarded through public tenders. So "do more" may be perceived as a poor concept by some.
I think companies who are on the business model you describe probably will cut workforce. But what most people seem to miss (that you and Hassabis don't) is that even if some companies are in cruise-control / cost-cutting mode, there will always be other companies that want to do more and grow. I'm not in the "AI will lead to mass unemployment" camp, though I do think there will be significant adjustment costs in the short run