Google DeepMind co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis gives a conference during the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona on February 26, 2024.
Pau Barrena | Afp | Getty Images
PARIS — Deepseek’s AI model “is probably the best work” out of China, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind said on Sunday, but added that the company didn’t show any new scientific advances.
Last month, China’s Deepseek released a research paper that rattled global markets after claiming its AI model was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips.
Deepseek’s announcement sparked an aggressive stock sell-off and sparked considerable debate over whether large tech firms are spending too much on AI infrastructure.
Hassabis praised Deepseek’s model as “an impressive piece of work.”
“I think its probably the best work I’ve seen come out of China,” Hassabis said at a Google-hosted event in Paris ahead of the AI Action Summit that is being hosted by the city.
The DeepMind CEO said the AI model shows that Deepseek can do “extremely good engineering” and that it “changes things on a geopolitical scale.”
However, from a technology point of view, Hassabis said it was not a big change.
“Despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance … it’s using known techniques [in AI],” he said, adding that the hype around Deepseek has been “exaggerated a little bit.”
The DeepMind CEO said that the company’s Gemini 2.0 Flash models, which Google this week released to everyone, are more efficient than DeepMind’s model.
Deepseek’s claims around its low cost and the chips it uses have been questioned by experts, who think the cost of development for the Chinese firm’s models is higher.
AGI five years away
The AI world has been debating for years when the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will happen. AGI broadly refers to AI that is smarter than humans.
Hassabis said that the AI industry is “on the path towards AGI,” which he describes as “a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities humans have.”
“I think we’re close now, you know, maybe we are only, you know, perhaps 5 years or something away from a system like that which would be pretty extraordinary,” Hassabis said.
“And I think society needs to get ready for that and what implications that will have. And, you know, make sure that we derive the benefits from that and the whole society benefits from that, but also we mitigate some of the risks, too.”
Hassabis’ comments mirror those of others in the industry who have suggested that AGI could be closer to reality.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this year said that he is “confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”
Still, many in the industry have also flagged multiple risks associated with AGI. One of the biggest concerns is that humans will lose control of the systems they created, a view shared by prominent AI scientists Max Tegmark and Yoshua Bengio, who recently shared their concerns with CNBC over this form of AI.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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