Demis Hassabis led Google DeepMind in the UK is willing to pay its employees a paid leave for an year rather than letting them work for a competitior as the artificial intelligence race heats up.
According to a report by Business Insider, Google DeepMind staff in the UK are subject to noncompete agreements that prevent them from working for a competitor for up to 12 months after they stop working at the company. Reportedly, DeepMind has also put some of these employees on extended garden leaves, meaning they are still paid by the company during the noncompete period.
DeepMind is said to consider various factors such as the seniority of the employess and how critical their work is to the company in order determine the length of their noncompete clauses.
AI race heats up:
The new report comes at a time when the artificial intelligence race has gone to another level. While AI has been all that anyone has been talking about since ChatGPT was revealed to the public in late 2022, there has been a renewed interest in the technology since the last few months due to a host of factors.
In the last 3 months alone, China’s DeepSeek AI launched its large language models in the global markets, wiping off a billions of dollars in stocks of tech companies as notions of requiring massive capitals to develop AI models came crashing down. Meanwhile, ChatGPT got massive updates as well as it rolled out o3 Mini reasoning model in January, followed by the rollout of Deep Research agent and more recently native image generator on GPT-4o that allowed the chatbot to create more accurate and context aware images.
Meanwhile, Google also recently added native image generation capabilities to Gemini 2.0 Flash language model, followed by the release of its most powerful model, Gemini 2.5 Pro which was also rolled out to the public for free later on.
And the AI race sees no signs of slowing down either, as companies including Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI have committed to spending billions of dollars this year alone to build AI infrastructure.
