The chief executive of DeepMind is in near-constant contact with Google CEO Sundar Pichai as Alphabet sharpens its strategy in the fast-moving global race for artificial intelligence, underlining how central the UK-based lab has become to Google’s future.
According to CNBC, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has been speaking with Pichai “every day” as the company accelerates efforts to compete more aggressively with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The close coordination reflects both the scale of the challenge posed by OpenAI and the growing confidence inside Google that it has regained momentum after an uneasy start to the generative AI boom.
At the beginning of 2025, investors openly questioned whether Google could keep pace with rivals that appeared to be moving faster and more publicly. ChatGPT’s rapid adoption raised concerns that Google’s core search business could be disrupted, while early AI missteps weighed on sentiment around Alphabet’s stock. By the end of the year, however, those doubts had largely faded. Alphabet shares delivered their strongest annual performance since 2009, signalling renewed investor belief in Google’s AI direction.
Much of that turnaround has been driven by DeepMind, the London-founded AI research lab that Google acquired in 2014 for about £400 million. Once known primarily for long-term scientific breakthroughs such as AlphaGo and protein-folding system AlphaFold, DeepMind has increasingly shifted toward building large-scale, commercially deployable AI systems that can be integrated across Google’s products.
The lab now sits at the heart of Google’s AI stack, powering advances in Gemini, the company’s flagship large language model, as well as AI features rolled out across Search, Workspace, Android and Google Cloud. Executives have stressed that tighter alignment between research and product teams is essential to competing with OpenAI, which has benefited from Microsoft’s backing and rapid product deployment through tools like ChatGPT and Copilot.
Hassabis has previously said that DeepMind’s mission remains rooted in building artificial general intelligence responsibly, but he has also acknowledged that the pace of competition has changed expectations. Industry analysts note that daily engagement between DeepMind and Google’s top leadership suggests a more operational, execution-focused phase, where breakthroughs must quickly translate into user-facing products.
The intensifying rivalry comes as AI investment continues to surge globally. Big Tech firms are spending tens of billions of dollars on data centres, chips and talent, while regulators in Europe, the US and elsewhere move to define rules around AI safety, competition and data use. For Google, maintaining leadership in AI is seen as existential, given how deeply the technology is expected to reshape search, advertising, productivity software and cloud computing.
With DeepMind now firmly embedded in Google’s core decision-making, investors appear increasingly convinced that Alphabet can compete at the highest level. Whether that daily dialogue will be enough to outpace OpenAI over the long term remains an open question, but the message from Google’s leadership is clear: the AI race is no longer experimental, and DeepMind is central to how the company plans to win it.
