Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis offers a rare, candid assessment of the global AI race, saying Western labs continue to lead on algorithmic breakthroughs even as China closes the gap on performance.
In an interview with Axios’ Mike Allen, Hassabis says China’s strongest labs are now only a short distance behind the latest Western AI systems.
“I think that we’re still in the US and in the West in the lead if you look at the latest benchmarks and the latest systems, but China is not far behind. If you look at the latest DeepSeek or the latest models, they’re very good, and there are some very capable teams there. So maybe the lead is only a matter of months as opposed to years at this point.”
On top of America’s advantage in terms of AI chips due to Trump’s export controls on Nvidia hardware, Hassabis says the US is clearly ahead in innovation. According to the Google DeepMind CEO, Chinese companies have not yet demonstrated fundamental breakthroughs in AI algorithms.
“I think chips is one thing, but I think algorithmically, innovation-wise, I think the West still has the edge. So I don’t think any of the Chinese models or companies have shown they can innovate on algorithmically something new beyond the state-of-the-art. They’ve been very good at fast-following the current state-of-the-art.”
In late November, Google’s Deep Learning lead and Gemini co-head, Oriol Vinyals, said that the company made training breakthroughs that propelled Gemini 3 into the front of the AI model race. According to Vinyals, Google discovered new methods to improve Gemini’s pre- and post-training to climb scaling walls that have hampered other AI firms.
Earlier this week, China’s DeepSeek said that its V3.2 Speciale rivals the reasoning performance of Gemini 3.0.
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