Google AI chief Demis Hassabis declares AGI is near as company transforms search into chatbot

Google's Demis Hassabis goes on the offensive

May 20 (Reuters) - Silicon Valley's biggest drama - the legal battle between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over the future of OpenAI - has been playing out in court in recent weeks. But who was the big star who never showed up? Google's AI czar Demis Hassabis. Altman and Musk each testified about how they were motivated to start OpenAI more than a decade ago out of fears about how Hassabis and Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab might steer humanity were they to reach artificial general intelligence, AGI for short, a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. "Unfortunately, humanity's future is in the hands of Demis," Musk wrote to Altman in one 2018 email used as evidence in court. On Tuesday, about 40 miles south in Mountain View, the world had a chance to see what Hassabis' vision for humanity looked like. "When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity. It will be a profound moment for humanity," Hassabis said during the keynote address for Google's annual I/O developer conference, referring to the theoretical moment when technology exceeds human control. CEO Sundar Pichai opened the two-hour address by teasing a flurry of new products centered around the AI being developed by Google DeepMind. They included ⁠the new Gemini 3.5 model family, an upgraded coding assistant, and a timeline for its revived smart glasses. But while Pichai has traditionally delivered closing remarks for the keynote, this year he turned the stage over to Hassabis to sum up our collective future. Hassabis declared that AGI would be the "most profound and impactful technology ever invented" and that his unit was now on the horizon of inventing it. "We're in a moment of immense promise, but also enormous responsibility," Hassabis said. If Musk's fears come true, it'll likely be the result of Google's ability to finance AI research from its lucrative core products. Read on to see how Google plans to pull this off. OUR LATEST REPORTING IN TECH AND AI Exclusive - At Samsung, the global AI boom spurred a looming strike and deep divisions Exclusive - Meta offers AI rival chatbots limited free WhatsApp access, sources say Musk's failed court attack on OpenAI could leave lasting scars on Altman's reputation Google DeepMind hires staff from Contextual AI in licensing deal, source says As chip industry chases AI, U.S. national labs look to newcomers for supercomputers Exclusive - Microsoft eyeing startup deals for life after OpenAI AVERTING CANNIBALISM Google's ubiquitous search engine is morphing increasingly into an AI chatbot in both cosmetics and function. Starting ⁠this week, the search bar will expand into a larger box if a user makes a lengthy query, executives said at I/O. Answers can come in the form of visuals that explain abstract scientific concepts or code that whips up a fitness tracker, all generated on the spot by Gemini. By combining AI's computational skills, Search's giant index of webpages, and an individual user's personal data and preferences, Google is looking to create an experience so attuned to users' needs that they never need to click out to an external website. Google is only able to make such changes to the product because its ad revenue continues to flow. Search advertising ⁠made up the majority of parent company Alphabet's $402.8 billion in revenue in 2025, and it remains a growing part of the business. More importantly, the business is growing thanks to AI usage. The more people used the search engine's AI features, the more they searched, Pichai said. Executives on stage said that AI Mode's queries had doubled every quarter since launch and that it now had more than 1 billion monthly users. On Wednesday, the ⁠company also revealed new advertising formats for AI Mode, further allaying fears that AI usage would hurt the lucrative ad business. Taken together, the product launches represent a definitive attempt by Google to put to bed past concerns that AI could cannibalize the core, a significant milestone as it is taking the fight to both big frontier model makers and chip giant Nvidia. Its profit engine has ⁠allowed Google to continue bankrolling projects beyond the core business, even as Google's AI rivals are pulling back on endeavors this year. OpenAI discontinued its Sora video app and disbanded its science division. Hassabis wrapped I/O with one final announcement: Gemini for Science, a platform tailored for performing scientific research and computation. "Stepping back, the whole reason I've worked on AI my entire career was because I saw it as the ultimate tool to advance science and our understanding of the world," Hassabis said. Reporting by Kenrick Cai, Editing by Ken Li and Rosalba O'Brien Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Kenrick Cai Thomson Reuters Kenrick Cai is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco. He covers Google, its parent company Alphabet and artificial intelligence. Cai joined Reuters in 2024. He previously worked at Forbes magazine, where he was a staff writer covering venture capital and startups. He received a Best in Business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing in 2023. He is a graduate of Duke University. Reach him on Signal at @kenrick.01.

How Google plans to win the AI war

Why it matters: Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Google enters the AI race with enormous scale, distribution and cash flow -- but also a vast empire it has to defend. Driving the news: As it has for the past two years, Google used this week's I/O developer conference to focus almost entirely on AI. * It's revamping its core search box to serve both traditional short queries, while seamlessly allowing it to expand for longer chatbot-style conversations. * YouTube, meanwhile, is getting a new "Ask YouTube" feature where people can ask a question and get both a text result -- for making a recipe, say, or fixing a clogged pipe -- as well as a link to the video. The big picture: Public perception of the AI race often swings wildly based on whichever company most recently released a flashy model. * For a while OpenAI was seen as unbeatable. Then late last year, Google was seen as having pulled ahead. And now many are pointing to Anthropic as having surged forward thanks to Mythos. * But executives at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic increasingly describe the frontier race as effectively neck-and-neck, with companies making different tradeoffs around cost, speed and computing resources. * This was highlighted by Google's choice to debut the latest Gemini not with a behemoth version to compete with Mythos but with the faster, cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash. * The choice reflects a broader Google strategy: Stay at the frontier, but also prioritize models cheap and fast enough to deploy across products used by billions, rather than chasing benchmark supremacy alone. * In other words, Google's key advantage may be in not just competing for the best model, but being able to pair that leading model with enormous platforms that dwarf even ChatGPT in scale. What they're saying: "The competition is fierce," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday during an on-stage interview with Future Forward's Matthew Berman. "A few labs are really at the frontier and then there's a big gap." Zoom in: A strong existing business is helping Google invest upwards of $180 billion in capital expenses this year -- up sixfold from 2022 -- without having to constantly raise money in the ways its rivals do. * Plus, having so many products allows Google to test a lot of things at scale and spread out the costs of developing state-of-the-art models. * "One of the cool things we get to do here at Google is build technologies that get immediately deployed into multibillion-dollar products," Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told Axios in an interview Tuesday. "It's pretty, pretty exciting, and I would say pretty unique." Yes, but: Adding AI everywhere risks not only making the products more complicated for users, but threatens to disrupt Google's highly lucrative business model. * If people get the answer they want from search directly, they may be less likely to click on an ad. * Letting people ask questions of YouTube videos could mean fewer people are watching the full videos -- and the ads within, potentially making YouTube less attractive to creators in addition to less lucrative to Google. * Meanwhile, ads within chatbots are still in the experimental phase, though Google announced some new tests at I/O and OpenAI is also charging forward, saying it sees AI ads as a $100 billion business by 2030. The bottom line: Google is betting it can do what few incumbents manage: reinvent its core products fast enough to survive the next platform shift while still funding the transition from the old business.