Google had a rollercoaster 2025 when it comes to the AI ​​race. The tech giant had lagged behind rivals like OpenAI. However, Google managed to change things by releasing new Gemini models. Now, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has explained how the company approached AI development with a ‘startup’ mentality. Hassabis also revealed that he discusses AI with Google CEO Sundar Pichai daily.

Sundar Pichai discusses daily with DeepMind CEO

In an interview with CNBC’s The Tech Download, Demis Hassabis explained that his close collaboration with Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been crucial in re-accelerating Google’s AI initiatives. According to the DeepMind chief, the two “talk pretty much every day about strategic things and where the technology should go, and what the broader Google needs.”

This has allowed DeepMind to become the “engine room” that powers Google’s AI technologies. Demis Hassabis added, “All the AI ​​technologies are done by this group… and then it’s spread across Google into all these incredible products.” Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for approximately £400 million (approximately Rs 4,000 crore at the time). In 2023, Google merged its Google Brain research team with DeepMind.

DeepMind CEO says Google is now more agile

In 2017, Google researchers developed Transformer, a key architecture that today powers large language models (LLMs) such as Gemini and ChatGPT. However, it was OpenAI that first brought AI chatbots to the market. Demis Hassabis believes that at the time, Google “may have been a little slow to commercialize it and scale it up.”

But now things have changed. According to DeepMind’s CEO, Google is once again operating with the same agility of a startup that has allowed for a much faster rollout for its AI products. “Over the last two, three years, I think we’ve almost had to come back to our startup or entrepreneurial roots and become more efficient, be faster, ship things really fast and make progress really fast,” he said.

The pressure to innovate has increased due to competition from rivals such as OpenAI, Amazon, Perplexity, and Anthropic. Hassabis called it a “brutal competitive environment”. He said that several veterans who had been in the tech sector for decades told him it was “probably the most intense environment I’ve ever been in in the technology industry.”

Google executive says he survives on 10 hours of meetings a day

While the work culture of a startup has increased efficiency and productivity at Google. For some people, this also involves long meetings every day. Dmitry Lyalin, head of product at Gemini, shared on X that he has to ‘survive’ long meetings every day to bring new features to AI models.

However, he has maintained silence on what the new features could be. “I’m in meetings 6-10 hours a day so we can coordinate and deliver new @geminicli features, like…oh wait, I can’t say that yet,” he wrote.