The CEO of Google's AI Initiative Is Worried About 2 Things, and Neither Is AI Replacing Jobs

Key Points

• Demis Hassabis says his top concerns are bad actors using AI for harmful purposes and the lack of safeguards to control powerful autonomous models.
• He proposes an international agreement to restrict access to advanced AI by malicious users while still enabling beneficial innovation.
• Evidence of misuse is already visible as criminals employ AI in deepfake phone scams and over 1,200 AI-generated news sites are spreading false information.
• Contrary to fears of mass unemployment, Hassabis believes AI will bring a “huge amount of change” to the workforce by creating new, even better jobs rather than causing widespread layoffs.

Demis Hassabis, the 48-year-old CEO of Google's AI research division DeepMind, isn't concerned about AI taking over jobs.

Instead, he's worried about two things: bad actors using AI technology, and a lack of protective measures to keep autonomous AI models in check.

Related: These Are AI's 'Most Obvious' Risks, According to Google's Former CEO

"Both of those risks are important, challenging ones," Hassabis told CNN this week.

Hassabis, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for co-creating an AI program that predicted protein structures, said he was worried about the possibility of humans misusing artificial general intelligence that matches or surpasses human intelligence.

He thinks there should be an international agreement to ensure that AI is only utilized for good, especially as it advances and becomes more powerful.

"How do we restrict access to these systems, powerful systems, to bad actors… but enable good actors to do many, many amazing things with it?" Hassabis questioned, per CNN.

^{Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images for SXSW London}

Criminals are already using AI to clone voices and impersonate people through deepfake phone scams. Hackers are also using AI to generate articles with false or misleading information. NewsGuard has identified over 1,200 AI-generated news sites spewing out false information with little human oversight.

As AI becomes more sophisticated, Hassabis says that the technology will result in a "huge amount of change" to the workforce. But instead of mass layoffs and unemployment, Hassabis posits it will create "new, even better jobs."

Related: These 3 Professions Are Most Likely to Vanish in the Next 20 Years Due to AI, According to a New Report

Other CEOs predict AI could cut jobs

Another AI CEO, Anthropic's 42-year-old Dario Amodei, had a starker prediction. Amodei told Axios last week that AI had the potential to wipe out half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next one to five years. He predicted that unemployment would rise to up to 20% as white-collar workers struggled to find work.

Amodei stated that AI would impact entry-level roles in industries like finance, technology, and law and said that most employees will not understand the danger posed by AI until they have lost their jobs to it.

In finance, company executives plan to cut 3% of their workforce within the next five years due to AI, per a January Bloomberg Intelligence report. That means 200,000 Wall Street jobs are at risk.

Meanwhile, tech CEOs are already turning to AI to write code. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in April that he expects AI to write half of Meta's code by next year, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in the same month that about 30% of new code at their companies was AI-generated.

As for law, venture capital investor Victor Lazarte, general partner at VC firm Benchmark, says AI is "fully replacing people" in the profession. In an April episode of the podcast "The Twenty Minute VC," Lazarte predicted that AI will be able to take over the busy work in law usually completed by recent graduates within the next three years.

Related: 'Fully Replacing People': A Tech Investor Says These Two Professions Should Be the Most Wary of AI Taking Their Jobs