Google DeepMind Boss Calls Out Layoffs: "Do More Stuff, Don't Fire People"

Corporate giant Amazon recently cut about 30,000 corporate employees, while fintech heavyweight Block slashed 40% of its staff in February, both blaming artificial intelligence for the purge. They are not alone in this trend; Salesforce, Snap, Oracle, and Microsoft have all eagerly joined the magical downsizing bandwagon. Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been happily predicting that AI will vaporize half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the near future.

But Demis Hassabis, the chief of Google DeepMind, thinks this entire line of thinking is deeply flawed. He pointed out that if AI makes engineers three to four times more productive, the smart move is to build three to four times more things, not fire everyone. He even hinted that some tech leaders predicting immediate mass displacement might just be chasing investor cash by hyping up their tech to impossible heights.

While other companies use AI as a fancy pink slip, Google is playing a completely different game. CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that a staggering 75% of new code at Google is now written by AI, up from 50% last autumn and a mere 25% in late 2024. Yet, instead of putting engineers on the street, Google is arming them with tools like Gemini 3.5 Flash and Antigravity, a tool designed to rewrite entire legacy codebases.

Instead of celebrating a smaller payroll, Hassabis wants to redirect freed-up engineering hours toward highly complex, creative challenges. His wish list for these newly productive teams includes everything from accelerating drug discovery in biotech labs to designing highly advanced video games.

It turns out firing an entire engineering department the moment a chatbot writes a functional loop is less of a strategic masterstroke and more of a total creative bankruptcy. The corporate world seems so obsessed with trimming the fat that they forgot how to build anything new.

Source: PC Gamer