LONDON — The boss of Google DeepMind is telling Silicon Valley it has the equation backwards. More productivity from artificial intelligence should mean more work, not fewer workers. That is the argument Demis Hassabis, the company’s chief executive, made on Friday, pushing directly against a trend that has seen major tech firms link job cuts to AI.
Amazon. Salesforce. Oracle. Microsoft. All have cited AI, at least in part, when announcing layoffs. Some executives have predicted the technology will swallow entry-level white-collar jobs whole. Hassabis looked at that and called it a failure of imagination.
His logic is blunt. If engineers become three or four times more productive — and Google has already said a large share of its new code is written with AI assistance — then companies should aim to do three or four times more work. Not cut heads. Hassabis framed freed-up engineers as a chance to tackle harder problems: drug discovery, new product design, things that were previously out of reach.
The timing matters. The wave of AI-linked layoffs has been building for months. Each new announcement feeds a public anxiety that machines are coming for jobs. Hassabis questioned the confidence behind those claims. He suggested some companies may have ulterior motives for tying cuts to AI — that the technology is a convenient excuse for cost-cutting that would have happened anyway.
Google itself has not been immune. The company has made cuts. But Hassabis pointed to a different path. Redeploy, don’t fire. Use the productivity gain to do more, not to shrink.
It is a direct challenge to the prevailing logic in tech. The industry has spent the past two years shedding staff after a pandemic hiring spree. AI has become a handy explanation. Hassabis is saying that explanation is wrongheaded.
The stakes are not small. If companies follow the path Hassabis describes, AI could fuel expansion into new fields. If they follow the path he warns against, the technology becomes a tool for consolidation and job loss. The difference is a choice, not a technological inevitability.
Hassabis’s comments land in a moment of deep uncertainty. Workers watch headlines about AI writing code, generating art, answering customer queries. They wonder where they fit. His answer is that they fit in the same company, doing harder work, supported by machines that handle the routine.
Whether other executives listen is an open question. The pressure to cut costs is real. Quarterly earnings calls reward efficiency. But Hassabis is betting that ambition — doing more, not less — is the better long-term bet. He is betting that a company that uses AI to discover new drugs or design new products will beat a company that uses AI to fire its junior staff.
That bet is now on the record. The debate over AI and jobs has its most prominent skeptic yet. And he runs one of the companies building the technology itself.
