Speaking to podcast Hard Fork hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs echoed what colleague Sundar Pichai – CEO of Google parent Alphabet – also said of the seemingly unsustainable AI industry.

"Are we in an AI bubble?" host Kevin asked candidly, to which Hassabis chuckles and pauses to consider his response.

"It's too binary a question, I would say," Hassabis replied. "My view on this – this is just strictly just my own opinion – is that there are some parts of the AI industry that are probably in a bubble. If you look at seed investment rounds being multi-ten-billion-dollar rounds with basically nothing, it seems ... there are talented teams, but it seems like that might be the first signs of some kind of bubble."

In a similarly timed interview, Pichai warned that even the biggest players, like Alphabet and all its subsidiaries like Google DeepMind, will feel it.

"I think no company is going to be immune, including us," he told the BBC.

And while the AI bubble is a hot topic as the end of 2025 nears – a year that's seen unprecedented investment and valuations of companies like Alphabet, Nvidia and OpenAI – it's not all doom and gloom.

"I think there's a lot of amazing work value to – at least from our perspective that we see – not only all the new product areas, like Gemini app, NotebookLM, and thinking more forward, robotics, gaming," Hassabis pivoted. "And drug discovery we're doing with Isomorphic, and Weymo. So there are all these new 'greenfield' areas. They're going to take a while to mature into massive multi-hundred-billion-dollar businesses, but I think there's actually potential for half a dozen to a dozen there, that I think Alphabet will be involved with, which I'm really excited about."

It's no secret that many companies in the field are operating at a loss right now – OpenAI has reportedly hemhoraged US$14 billion in this quarter alone – but the DeepMind boss remains optimistic.

"Immediate returns – this is the engine room part of Google, where we're pushing this into all of these incredible multi-billion-user products that people use every day. We have so many ideas, it's just about execution," he added. "I think a lot of that will also bring in near-term revenue and direct returns, while we're also investing in the future.