Demis Hassabis thinks the companies cutting engineers to ride the AI wave have got it backwards. The Google DeepMind CEO told WIRED that when developers become three or four times more productive, the smart move is to do three or four times more work, not march people out the door. To him, treating AI gains as a reason to shrink headcount is a failure of nerve dressed up as strategy.And he made clear he would happily take the talent everyone else is shedding. “I have a million ideas, from lab drug discovery to game design,” he said. “I’d love to have some free engineers to go and do those kinds of things.” His pitch arrives in the middle of a brutal stretch for tech workers, with 2026 layoffs already past 142,000 and the cuts still coming.
Why Google Deepmind CEO calls the AI layoff logic a failure of imagination
Hassabis isn’t buying the idea that sharper coding models spell doom for software developers. Gemini 3.5 Flash, DeepMind’s newest model, can translate large codebases between languages, hunt down bugs buried deep in knotty code, and even write operating systems from scratch. That kind of capability has fuelled fears AI is about to gut programming jobs.He sees the opposite coming. “I have no idea why people are going around talking with certainty about that,” he said. He also floated a sharper read on the motives behind the doom talk. “Perhaps there is an ulterior motive for putting those messages out; raising money or whatever.”His core argument is that productivity should expand ambition, not trim payroll. If engineers get three or four times faster, he wants three or four times more stuff built. Companies choosing to replace developers instead, he argued, are showing “a lack of imagination, and a lack of understanding of what’s really going to happen.”
The companies doing the cutting from Meta to Amazon, and the reasons they give
The layoff list this year reads like a who’s who of tech. Meta has begun cutting around 8,000 jobs, roughly 10% of its workforce, as it pours money into AI infrastructure. Amazon eliminated about 16,000 corporate roles in January, on top of earlier rounds. Microsoft has trimmed more than 15,000 positions, while Intuit cut 17% of its staff and Cloudflare shed over 1,100 people, more than a fifth of its workforce.The crypto and fintech world has been hit too. Coinbase let go of roughly 700 staff, Block cut 4,000, and PayPal is trimming nearly 4,800 over the next few years. Website builders Wix and Webflow both announced rounds, and Atlassian cut about 1,600. Many of these firms cited AI directly. Cloudflare said its internal AI use had jumped more than 600% in three months. Others, like Epic Games, which laid off over 1,000, insisted AI had nothing to do with it.
The bigger AI jobs debate Demis Hassabis just stepped into
Hassabis isn’t alone in pushing back. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently called the AI-to-layoffs narrative “just too lazy,” questioning how firms could blame a technology that only turned useful months ago for cuts made years earlier. “AI has just arrived. How is it possible they’re already losing jobs?” Huang asked.Even the executives who once sounded the loudest alarms have softened their tone. OpenAI’s Sam Altman now says he was “pretty wrong” about AI wiping out entry-level white-collar roles, admitting the displacement he feared simply hasn’t shown up. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who once warned AI could erase half of such jobs, has reframed automation as a productivity multiplier rather than a job killer.The timing has drawn some side-eye. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are eyeing trillion-dollar IPOs this year, and critics note that a calmer jobs message plays better with the pension funds and asset managers they need on board. The data backs the skeptics, at least for now. The Yale Budget Lab found no meaningful shift in unemployment rates for jobs heavily exposed to AI since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, even as the layoffs climb.For Hassabis, Alphabet’s sprawl is the point. The company oversees far more than Google, giving it room to pour productivity gains into new projects rather than cost cuts. Drug discovery, game design, and a backlog of ideas he says he can’t staff fast enough are all waiting. So whether rivals follow his lead or keep trimming, his pitch to the newly unemployed stays blunt: come build something.
