As the artificial intelligence race heats up, Demis Hassabis-led Google DeepMind is willing to pay its employees a year’s paid leave rather than let them work for a competitor in the UK.
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. DeepMind has also put some of these employees on extended garden leaves, meaning the company still pays them during the non-compete period.
DeepMind is said to consider various factors such as the seniority of the employees and how critical their work is to the company, to determine the length of their noncompete clauses.
AI race heats up:
The new report comes when the artificial intelligence race has gone to another level. While AI has been in the limelight 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 three months alone, China’s DeepSeek AI launched its large language models in the global markets, wiping off billions of dollars in tech company stocks as notions of requiring massive capital to develop AI models came crashing down. Meanwhile, ChatGPT got massive updates. It rolled out the o3 Mini reasoning model in January, followed by the rollout of the Deep Research agent and, more recently, the native image generator on GPT-4o, which allowed the chatbot to create more accurate and context-aware images.
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.
The AI race shows no signs of slowing down, either. Companies such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI have committed to spending billions of dollars this year alone to build AI infrastructure.