Demis Hassabis, the Nobel chemistry laureate and Google DeepMind chief executive officer (CEO), said the gap between the United States and China in artificial intelligence (AI) technology has narrowed to just a matter of months.
On the 15th (local time), in an interview with U.S. business network CNBC, CEO Hassabis said of China's AI capabilities, "I think they are much closer to the cutting-edge models in the United States or the West than we expected 1 to 2 years ago," adding, "At this point, they are likely only a few months behind."
He cited China's AI models that are rapidly catching up with U.S. AI, including DeepSeek, the cost-effective model that shook the market in Jan. last year, Alibaba, and ZhipuAI, which was recently listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
However, CEO Hassabis said that while China may catch up with the United States in AI, it remains uncertain whether it can create new innovations that go beyond performance improvements in cutting-edge AI models. He said, "China has yet to show whether it can achieve an innovation like a new transformer that goes beyond the cutting edge."
The transformer is a language model that Google released in 2017, and it is the technology that underpins widely used Generative AI such as ChatGPT and Gemini. In OpenAI's popular chatbot "ChatGPT," the "T" is the initial of transformer.
He said, "Inventing something is 100 times harder than copying," emphasizing, "That is the real next-generation challenge." He added that this is not merely a matter of technical capability but of a culture or spirit that encourages innovation and exploration.
He predicted that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be developed in the near future. He said, "When I started DeepMind in 2010, I thought it would take about 20 years to build AGI," adding, "Now I think we are 5 to 10 years away from that goal."
On the AI bubble debate, he said, "Some parts of the industry may be in a bubble, but fundamentally AI is the most innovative technology humanity has invented," adding, "There are aspects similar to the internet bubble. In the end, the internet was fundamental, and during that period corporations that defined a generation were born."
He expressed regret that Google lagged in the early AI race despite releasing many core technologies such as AlphaGo and transformers. He said, "Google effectively invented 90% of the technologies everyone uses today, but in retrospect we were somewhat slow to commercialize and scale them," adding, "OpenAI and others did that part well."
Asked whether Google's AI model Gemini, which recently ranked at the top in benchmarks, can maintain that lead, he answered, "Of course."
Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, has led Google's AI technology development since Google acquired DeepMind in 2014.