DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has said parts of the AI industry may be in a speculative bubble, but has insisted the technology itself will endure and ultimately thrive as genuinely valuable companies emerge.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has acknowledged that parts of the AI industry
“might be in a bubble”, but has insisted machine learning is “going to be the most transformative technology ever invented”.
Speaking on CNBC’s The Tech Download podcast, Hassabis admitted some areas of AI investment may eventually falter, particularly where startups are attracting multi-billion-dollar valuations without viable products.
However, he framed that excess as a familiar phase in the lifecycle of transformational technologies, rather than a sign of impending collapse.
He said of a possible decline in the AI industry: “That’s sort of almost inevitable. There’ll be overexuberance once everyone realizes how transformative a specific technology is.
“And then there’ll be a reckoning and then the things that are real will survive and flourish.”
Hassabis compared the AI movement to the dot-com bubble of the late ‘90s and early 2000’s.
He explained: “In the end, the internet was critical, and there were some generational companies that were created during that time.”
His comments come after a dramatic turnaround for Alphabet.
After early doubts in 2025 about whether Google could keep pace with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company’s shares ended the year with their strongest performance since 2009.
Much of that momentum has been driven by DeepMind, which Hassabis described as the “engine room” behind Google’s AI strategy.
Since the merger of Google Brain and DeepMind in 2023, the group has focused on accelerating product delivery as competition intensified.
Hassabis said Google had to rediscover its “startup or entrepreneurial roots”, moving faster and shipping AI tools more aggressively.
That shift culminated in the rollout of Gemini 2.5 in early 2025 and the widely praised Gemini 3 later in the year.
The DeepMind chief said the company’s advantage now lies in how quickly its models can be deployed across Google’s vast product ecosystem, from search to cloud services.
He added that he speaks with Google CEO Sundar Pichai “pretty much every day” to adjust strategy and roadmaps in response to a rapidly changing market.
While acknowledging investor anxiety around AI valuations, Hassabis argued that the scale of transformation ahead makes some turbulence inevitable
He said: “AI is going to be the most transformative technology ever invented”, stressing that Google’s diversified business puts it in a position to benefit whether the boom continues or cools.
DeepMind CEO admits AI ‘might be in a bubble’, but stresses technology will ‘survive and flourish’
