AI layoffs are ‘dumb’, says Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis

While Amazon has cut 30,000 corporate roles in roughly six months and Meta has shed 8,000 jobs, both citing AI-driven productivity, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is publicly calling that logic out. 

His verdict: companies doing this lack imagination, and some may have motives that have nothing to do with the technology itself.

Speaking to Wired ahead of Google I/O, Hassabis took direct aim at executives predicting mass displacement. "I have no idea why people are going around talking with certainty about that," he said. "Perhaps there is an ulterior motive for putting those messages out, raising money or whatever."

The comment arrives as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, a message Amodei has amplified while his company pursues a reported $900 billion valuation.

"I'd love to have some free engineers to go and do those kinds of things," he told Wired, citing a backlog of projects spanning drug discovery to game development.

This point repositions AI as a tool for increasing capacity rather than saving costs, a line of reasoning that contrasts dramatically with Hassabis’s view compared to the prevailing one at firms such as Block, which laid off 40% of its employees in February, as well as Salesforce, Snap, Oracle, and Microsoft, who have justified their own layoffs through AI efficiencies.

According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, around 30% of all new code written at the firm is AI-generated.