Google AI CEO Wants To Hire Engineers Laid Off From Meta And Amazon, Says Has Million Ideas For Them

Google AI CEO Demis Hassabis says that laying off engineers to ride the AI is something that should not be practiced in this era. He said to WIRED that when developers become three or four times more productive, the smart move is to do three or four times more work, not march people out the door. As per him, treating AI gains as a reason to shrink headcount is a failure of nerve dressed up as strategy.He also stated that he will happily hire the talent everyone is cutting. Hassabis said, 'I have a million ideas, from lab drug discovery to game design. I'd love to have some free engineers to go and do those kinds of things.' His pitch for the same comes at a time when tech workers are being laid off left, right, and centre. Until now, in 2026,

more than 142,000 people have been laid off, and more are still to come. Hassabis is also not buying the idea that intelligent coding models could create difficulty for software developers. Gemini 3.5 Flash, DeepMind's newest model, can translate large codebases between languages, hunt down bugs buried deep in knotty code, and even write operating systems from scratch. That kind of capability has fuelled fears that AI is about to chop off all programming jobs. He said, 'I have no idea why people are going around talking with certainty about that.'Why Microsoft Told Its Engineers To Stop Using Anthropic's Claude: The Official And Unofficial ReasonsHassabis also said, 'Perhaps there is an ulterior motive for putting those messages out, raising money or whatever.' He says that productivity should expand ambition, not trim payroll. If engineers get three or four times faster, he wants three or four times more stuff built. Firms choosing to replace developers instead, he argued, are showing 'a lack of imagination, and a lack of understanding of what is really going to happen.'And it is not only about Hassabis, pretty recently, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang also said that AI is not going to eat the jobs of software engineers, instead, it is also going to create more jobs. He also said that artificial intelligence is making the engineers more efficient and productive.