Demis Hassabis Thinks AI Job Cuts Are Dumb

Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, is keen to speech astir the coding skills of his company’s newest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. The exemplary has been trained to execute analyzable agentic coding tasks: construe ample codification bases from 1 connection to another; find and hole bugs lurking heavy successful knotty code; and adjacent constitute full operating systems from scratch.

Hassabis does not, however, deliberation this spells doom for bundle developers. “I person nary thought wherefore radical are going astir talking with certainty astir that,” Hassabis tells WIRED up of the caller exemplary uncover astatine today’s Google’s I/O event.

“Perhaps determination is an ulterior motive for putting those messages out; raising wealth oregon whatever,” Hassabis says. “From my constituent of view, from DeepMind and Google's constituent of view, if engineers are becoming 3 oregon 4 times much productive, past we conscionable [want to] bash 3 oregon 4 times much stuff.”

The striking coding abilities of the latest models has led to wide fearfulness that AI whitethorn beryllium connected the brink of eliminating programming roles and different white-collar jobs. Executives astatine immoderate AI companies person predicted wide occupation displacement, portion immoderate salient tech companies, including Amazon, Salesforce, and Block, person blamed caller layoffs connected the usage of AI.

Hassabis thinks that Alphabet, which oversees respective companies too Google, whitethorn beryllium good positioned to instrumentality vantage of a gyration successful bundle productivity. “I person a cardinal ideas, from laboratory cause find to crippled design,” helium says. “I'd emotion to person immoderate escaped engineers to spell and bash those kinds of things.”

Hassabis says that companies looking to regenerate developers with AI whitethorn beryllium making a large mistake. “I deliberation it's a deficiency of imagination—and a deficiency of knowing of what's truly going to happen,” helium says.

Google revealed a raft of AI worldly astatine its yearly developer event. Through a coding instrumentality called Antigravity, Gemini 3.5 Flash offers frontier coding and reasoning capabilities but is faster and cheaper than the offerings of its competitors, Google says. Gemini 3.5 Pro, a much almighty caller mentation of its flagship model, volition debut adjacent month.

The institution needs to drawback up erstwhile it comes to AI coding, which has emerged arsenic a important and lucrative exertion for the latest AI models. Anthropic and OpenAI pb developer adoption with their respective tools, Claude and Codex, according to a 2025 Stack Overflow survey.

The institution besides demoed an agentic adjunct called Spark that lives successful Google’s Cloud and has entree to its apps. The plan is meant to beryllium safer than thing similar OpenClaw due to the fact that it has constricted entree to idiosyncratic data, Google says.

Other agentic demos included a mentation of Android with an AI cause built successful and a refreshed mentation of Google Search that uses agentic coding to make a tract oregon app connected the alert successful effect to a hunt query.

AI coding has captivated the AI satellite successful caller months, adjacent inspiring anticipation that models could 1 time rewrite their ain codification successful a self-improvement loop. Hassabis says it’s imaginable but doubts that it volition instantly pb to superhuman-level AI.

Progress successful different areas of subject mightiness necessitate AI models to person a deeper knowing of the carnal satellite and adjacent an quality to execute experiments wrong it, helium says.

Even wrong the seemingly solved satellite of coding, Hassabis says it is notable that AI has yet to nutrient a blockbuster app oregon video crippled without quality help. “I deliberation there's thing missing,” helium says.