After Sundar Pichai, Google DeepMind CEO praises DeepSeek but says “despite the hype, there’s no…”

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis praised Deepseek's AI model as “probably the best work” from China, acknowledging its impressive engineering and geopolitical impact. However, he downplayed its technological significance, stating that the hype is a bit “exaggerated.”
Praising Deepseek’s AI model as “an impressive piece of work” at a Google-hosted event in Paris ahead of the AI Action Summit (via Business Insider) that is being hosted by the city, Hassabis said, “I think its probably the best work I’ve seen come out of China.”
The DeepMind CEO said the AI model shows that Deepseek can do “extremely good engineering” and that it “changes things on a geopolitical scale.”
His comments came soon after Google CEO Sundar Pichai praised DeepSeek during the Google-parent company Alphabet's Q4 2024 earnings call
“I think [DeepSeek has] a tremendous team. I think they've done very, very good work,” Pichai said.

Hassabis, however, noted that the AI models by DeepSeek do not represent any new scientific advances and are merely utilising existing AI techniques. He suggested that Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash models are more efficient.
“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.”
Deepseek's claims about low development costs and the use of less-advanced chips have also faced scrutiny.
Last month, China’s Deepseek published a research paper, claiming that its AI model was trained at a fraction of the cost of industry leaders and using less advanced Nvidia chips. The announcement triggered a sharp stock sell-off and fueled intense debate over whether major tech firms are overspending on AI infrastructure.

Regarding Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Hassabis believes the industry is on track “towards AGI,” that will be “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,” he added.