Thank you very much. Well, I think you've touched on the competition in the AI space, and one of the key reasons for that is the pace of innovation. So perhaps, Demis, we could come to you and get your views on how you respond to that pace and what we need to be doing to keep up and get ahead.
Well, it's a very exciting time right now in AI. The pace of progress has been incredible, but it's also a very serious moment. I think we're at a decisive moment. I've been working on AI for over 20 years now. DeepMind was started more than 15 years ago when almost nobody was working on AI. Now the whole world is working on it. We've always believed it will be the most transformative technology humanity will ever invent. So how we build it, the decisions we make now, will be decisive. I'm very excited about applying AI to science and accelerating scientific discovery and medicine. That's why I spent my whole career on AI. We're making great progress, but it's a dual-use technology with risks. I'd love to see more international dialogue on minimum standards for AI systems. I've been saying for a long time, maybe 10 years ago, that to influence this debate on a global scale, you have to lead technically to have a seat at the table. The UK, France, and other like-minded countries like Canada and Switzerland, if we band together with shared values, we can form a counterweight to the two global superpowers and influence the debate globally. That's very important because this technology will affect everyone.
Thank you very much. Arthur, if I could come to you on a similar point, addressing the idea that the pace of innovation is both a challenge and an opportunity, and how Mistral AI thinks about and responds to that.
Well, one of the premises of starting Mistral AI was to commit to open science and bring open source models to the world. We started as a French and British company, incorporating two companies almost simultaneously, with a workforce in the UK very quickly. To Demis's point, we need as countries to have a seat at the table to innovate. If you don't innovate, you're down to regulating, and that's less interesting with less say in how technology is used. Our approach leverages the power of both countries in training people and having great scientists. By committing to open technology and building an enterprise business on top, we've been able to accelerate and change how the field thinks about transparency and accessibility of models. With models released in 2023, the academic world has used them extensively. Mistral 7B, our first model, has been widely cited because it's small enough for university scientists to work on and study. By committing to open source more than the US, which is often torn due to competition with China, we've spread science and attracted new scientists to the field.
4 more exchanges in this transcript
Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.
Hassabis, D. (2025, July 9). President Macron & DeepMind CEO Hassabis Speak at London AI Summit | Future of Global AI | AI1E [Interview transcript]. DWS News. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/240108/
MLA
Demis Hassabis. "President Macron & DeepMind CEO Hassabis Speak at London AI Summit | Future of Global AI | AI1E." DWS News, 9 Jul. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/240108/.
BibTeX
@misc{hassabis2025_240108,
author = {Demis Hassabis},
title = {President Macron \& DeepMind CEO Hassabis Speak at London AI Summit | Future of Global AI | AI1E},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, DWS News. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {jul},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/240108/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
