Demis Hassabis reveals Google's three-stage stack rewrite: AI first, model first, agent first. Bolting agents onto normal software does not scale to billions.
"We've got to, we've done a lot of engineering work under the hood in the last year, which you'll see, you see the surface of when we announced things like this."
"But actually, you can almost think that whole stack had to be rewritten to be sort of AI first, model first, and now agent first."
"So that's quite a big change from like normal software."
"And obviously there's all this huge infrastructure that serves billions of users every day at lightning speed and that's all gonna work."
"And I think we've made massive improvements on that over the past year. And that's why you can see all the goodness of the AI models flowing through into our product surfaces so quickly and in such compelling ways."
Most companies are adding an agent interface to yesterday's software. Demis says Google changed the substrate itself.
The moat may not be the model. It may be the infrastructure that lets the model reach billions of users every day without breaking.
- Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis), CEO of Google DeepMind, with @rowancheung at Google I/O 2026
We’re going to need a few days to recover from this one… 😮💨
2 men under 2 hours. 3 men breaking the world record.
We have officially entered the new era of marathon running 🫳🎤