Google AI CEO Demis Hassabis has a message for laid off engineers at Meta, Amazon, Block, and other companies: I have a million ideas, I would love to have some free engineers to go and…

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.

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