Google’s top AI executive seeks the profound over profits and the “prosaic”

In the 11 years since Google acquired artificial-intelligence startup DeepMind, founder Demis Hassabis has become the search giant’s top AI executive, won a Nobel Prize, and earned millions of dollars.

For Alphabet, Google’s parent company, the benefits have been slower to materialize.

In the scramble for AI dominance, Google risks losing the supremacy it has long enjoyed in the search industry. It was jolted when OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, showed in 2022 that AI could deliver information more seamlessly than a traditional search engine.

OpenAI did…