Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis: AI's Next Breakthroughs, AGI Timeline, Google's AI Glasses Bet
Big Technology Podcast
Alex Kantrowitz
4.7 • 596 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Google DeepMind CEO, Demis Asabas, joins us to talk about the path from here to AGI, |
| 0:05.8 | when Google's AI glasses are coming and whether the pace of AI progress can keep up at this rate. |
| 0:11.5 | That's coming up right after this. |
| 0:13.6 | Welcome to a special edition of Big Technology podcast from Davos. |
| 0:17.4 | I'm Alex Cantorwitz, and I'm joined today by a special guest, Demis, the CEO of Google DeepMind Demis. Welcome back to the show. |
| 0:24.6 | Great to be here. A year ago, there were real questions about whether AI progress was tailing off. It was in fashion to ask whether LLMs were going to hit a wall. And those questions seem like they've been settled. There's been a tremendous amount of progress over the past year. |
| 0:40.3 | Could you tell us what specifically has happened that's gotten the AI industry from that moment of question last year to the point that it is today? |
| 0:49.3 | Well, for us internally, we were never questioning that. |
| 0:53.3 | Just to be clear, I think we've always been seeing great improvements. |
| 0:58.0 | So we were a bit puzzled by why there was this question in the air. |
| 1:03.0 | I mean, some of it was to do, people were worried about data running out. |
| 1:07.0 | And there is some truth in that is all the data had been used. |
| 1:11.0 | Can we create synthetic data that's going to be useful to learn from? |
| 1:14.8 | But actually it turns out you can ring more juice out of the existing architectures and data. |
| 1:20.9 | So there's plenty of room, I think, and we're still seeing that in both the pre-training, |
| 1:25.0 | the post-training and the thinking paradigms, and also the way that they all kind of fit together. |
| 1:31.3 | So I think there's still plenty of headroom there just with the techniques we already know about and tweaking and kind of innovating on top of that. |
| 1:39.3 | All right, here's what a skeptic would say. |
| 1:41.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:42.3 | That there have been a lot of tricks that have been put on top of LLMs. |
| 1:45.0 | I hear often about scaffolding and orchestration and AI that can use a tool to search the web, |
| 1:53.0 | but it won't remember what it learns. As soon as you close that session, it forgets. |
... |
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