Demis Hassabis is one of the defining figures of the AI era. Google recognized his potential early, buying DeepMind just four years after he founded it.
What once began as a small London-based company now sits at the heart of Google’s fight to lead in artificial intelligence, as the company races to compete with a growing field of global rivals including OpenAI and Anthropic.
But a leadership shakeup announced on Wednesday, which saw Hassabis step back from being CEO to become chair of Google DeepMind and parent company Alphabet‘s chief scientist leave, concerned investors and the share price dropped following the announcement.
I have covered DeepMind for more than a decade and recently sat down with Hassabis for an exclusive interview. What may have come as a surprise to many, to me, feels like a natural progression.
But the move also exposes the tension at the center of Google’s AI strategy: Hassabis wants to use AI to transform science, while Google needs to commercialize, monetize and scale the technology fast enough to justify the billions it is spending.
Hassabis’ scientific quest
Hassabis has been very vocal about his goals with AI. In our interview on CNBC’s podcast “The Tech Download” that was recorded in December, Hassabis said he spent his whole career on AI because it will eventually become “the ultimate tool for science.”
Over the years, under Hassabis’ leadership, DeepMind has made some significant breakthroughs. One of those achievements was AlphaGo, a computer system that took on the best player in the world at the ancient Asian board game Go and won. Another is AlphaFold, an AI software that can predict protein structure folding, which is key for understanding diseases and drug discovery.
Hassabis told me none of this would have been possible without Google’s backing and the “amount of compute that they could bring to play,” referring to the tech giant’s ample computing power driven by its own chips.
The DeepMind co-founder has been instrumental in pushing the science from within DeepMind at Google. He has also pursued artificial general intelligence, or AGI — AI that can match human capabilities across most cognitive tasks. Hassabis on Wednesday said he believes AGI is “close at hand” in a blog post on Wednesday accompanying the news of his new role.
Hassabis said his motivation for handing over day-to-day operations is to work on strategic and global AGI matters, advise his successor, the new senior vice president of Google DeepMind, Koray Kavukcuoglu, and dedicate time to Isomorphic Labs, a company he co-founded that is dedicated to AI drug discovery.
The move from the company’s co-founder “isn’t out of character,” said Sebastian Mallaby, who wrote “The Infinity Machine,” about Hassabis and DeepMind.
“Demis cared about safety enough that he sold DeepMind to Google, not to Facebook, even though Facebook offered more money. He cared enough about safety that he fought a three-year battle with Alphabet to get external oversight over DeepMind’s AI deployment,” Mallaby wrote on X on Wednesday.
“This next chapter of his career is a return to that side of his work.”
‘Ferocious’ competition and commercialization push
While scientific work has continued at Google DeepMind, the reality of the current competitive environment is very different. Google’s parent Alphabet is planning to spend up to $205 billion this year at a time when investors are scrutinizing Big Tech’s capital expenditure. The company is also facing intense competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, hyperscalers and Chinese players.
Hassabis said the competitive environment was “ferocious” during our December interview.
That signaled to me that, while Google remains supportive of DeepMind’s scientific endeavours, perhaps that new level of competition is driving more of a focus on commercialization and monetization of its AI, as well as keeping up, on a technological level, with its rivals.
The groundwork was already being laid. Hassabis told me he was talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai nearly every day about “strategic things” while keeping the long-term goals of AGI in focus as well. This allowed Google to ship product faster compared to what they saw as a slower pace than their competitors.
Google DeepMind Chair and Co-Founder Demis Hassabis being interviewed by CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal.
CNBC
The new organizational structure will likely look to continue that division of operations but with deeper integration.
There was one more telling comment from Hassabis during our interview: his response to a question about whether the pursuit of AGI should be slowed down.
“It’s a very complex geopolitical and corporate system that we’re in … there are many companies trying to build this. There are also many nations trying to build it. And there’s a sort of race dynamic, which ideally wouldn’t be there,” Hassabis said.
“So in an ideal case, this would be a scientific endeavour, and … each step would be carefully considered. But unfortunately … the real world isn’t like that, and we have to kind of be pragmatic about where we are.”
Hassabis went on to say that as DeepMind pushes towards more advanced AI, it is trying to “be as responsible as possible.”
His comments hit to the heart of the changes we have seen — there is an intense “race” that Alphabet wants to lead, which might not sync up with where Hassabis wants to put his future efforts.
