When Sundar Pichai made it clear to Demis Hassabis: Inside Google, DeepMind does not have the ‘bet’ option, it is for… – The Times of India

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When Sundar Pichai made it clear to Demis Hassabis: Inside Google, DeepMind does not have the ‘bet’ option, it is for… – The Times of India

By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-04-04 07:52:00

Demis Hassabis spent over two years negotiating a semi-independent governance structure for DeepMind inside Alphabet—complete with a $1 billion walk-away plan and a proposed 3-3-3 oversight board. Sundar Pichai shut it down, arguing AI was too central to Google’s core business to be spun out. The failed experiment eventually changed how Hassabis thinks about AI safety altogether.

Demis Hassabis had spent months shuttling between London and Mountain View—11-hour flights, jet lag, endless legal negotiations—trying to wrangle DeepMind into a semi-independent Alphabet company with its own oversight board. Then, on January 9, 2017, he sat down with Sundar Pichai at Google‘s headquarters, Suleyman dialled in from Asilomar, and the whole thing unravelled.Pichai sounded warm, open, amenable. There were just a few details left to iron out, he said. Resolve them with David Drummond. The next day, Drummond showed up and announced that Hassabis had misread the room entirely. Pichai was…

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