Google DeepMind co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis gives a conference during the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona on February 26, 2024.
Pau Barrena | Afp | Getty Images
PARIS — Deepseek’s AI model “is probably the best work” out of China, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind said on Sunday, but added that the company didn’t show any new scientific advances.
Last month, China’s Deepseek released a research paper that rattled global markets after claiming its AI model was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips.
Deepseek’s announcement sparked an aggressive stock sell-off and sparked considerable debate over whether large tech firms are spending too much on AI infrastructure.
Hassabis praised Deepseek’s model as “an impressive piece of work.”
“I think its probably the best work I’ve seen come out of China,” Hassabis said at a Google-hosted event in Paris ahead of the AI Action Summit that is being hosted by the city.
The DeepMind CEO said the AI model shows that Deepseek can do “extremely good engineering” and that it “changes things on a geopolitical scale.”
However, from a technology point of view, Hassabis said it was not a big change.
“Despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance … it’s using known techniques [in AI],” he said, adding that the hype around Deepseek has been “exaggerated a little bit.”
The DeepMind CEO said that the company’s Gemini 2.0 Flash models, which Google this week released to everyone, are more efficient than DeepMind’s model.
Deepseek’s claims around its low cost and the chips it uses have been questioned by experts, who think the cost of development for the Chinese firm’s models is higher.
AGI five years away
The AI world has been debating for years when the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will happen. AGI broadly refers to AI that is smarter than humans.
Hassabis said that the AI industry is “on the path towards AGI,” which he describes as “a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities humans have.”
“I think we’re close now, you know, maybe we are only, you know, perhaps 5 years or something away from a system like that which would be pretty extraordinary,” Hassabis said.
“And I think society needs to get ready for that and what implications that will have. And, you know, make sure that we derive the benefits from that and the whole society benefits from that, but also we mitigate some of the risks, too.”
Hassabis’ comments mirror those of others in the industry who have suggested that AGI could be closer to reality.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this year said that he is “confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”
Still, many in the industry have also flagged multiple risks associated with AGI. One of the biggest concerns is that humans will lose control of the systems they created, a view shared by prominent AI scientists Max Tegmark and Yoshua Bengio, who recently shared their concerns with CNBC over this form of AI.
