DeepMind CEO Hassabis publicly praises Anthropic CEO Dario as the best among other AI lab leaders

ME News report, April 21 (UTC+8). According to Beating monitoring, late on April 20 local time, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis held a conversation with biographer Sebastian Mallaby in San Francisco. The event was hosted by City Arts & Lectures, as promotion for Mallaby’s Hassabis biography, The Infinity Machine, published in March this year. Hassabis made direct comments about competitors, saying that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is “the best of all the other lab leaders” (his exact words: best of all the other lab leaders). Mallaby also estimated that OpenAI has a 50% chance of going bankrupt within the next 18 months. His primary work is as a financial historian and a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations of the United States—not as an AI industry analyst.

OpenAI previously disclosed that it is expected to lose $14 billion in 2026, and based on that, U.S. media speculated that the company could face a cash crunch in 2027. Regarding “AI apocalyptic risk” p(doom), Hassabis was unwilling to provide a specific number but insisted that it is non-zero. He criticized a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun for insisting that p(doom) is 0, calling their stance “ridiculous.”

p(doom) is AI industry jargon—referring to an individual’s subjective probability estimate that “AI will ultimately lead to human catastrophe.” (Source: BlockBeats)