You may have only recently heard about Demis Hassabis. He’s been named one of Time magazine’s “AI architects”, won a Nobel Prize for using the technology to predict protein folding and runs Google’s AI efforts. When the search giant acquired his company DeepMind in 2014, he embraced his new employer’s vast resources to build machines that surpassed human brainpower, so-called artificial general intelligence.
His biggest achievements since then have been to give Google the glow of scientific prestige, with AI systems that beat the world’s top Go players and that Nobel Prize for chemistry. A product breakthrough has long eluded Hassabis, but that could change in 2026 if his unconventional ideas make their way into Google’s second attempt at smart glasses, the kind of development that could mark a full turnaround for a company that was caught on the back foot three years ago by ChatGPT.
When Google acquired his company DeepMind in 2014, Demis Hassabis embraced his new employer’s vast resources to build machines that surpassed human brainpower, so-called artificial general intelligence.Credit: AP
Google plans to launch AI-powered smart glasses next year to compete with similar products from Meta Platforms Inc. It’ll partner with Samsung to make the devices, one of which will come with a small, in-lens display for things such as navigation or translation. They could offer redemption to Hassabis’ company in two ways. First, the original Google Glasses looked so absurd and worked so badly that they ruined the reputation of smart glasses for several years. Stylish, useful AI specs would rehabilitate the technology.
Second, it could prove Hassabis’ long-standing belief that chatbots are not the only path to powerful, helpful AI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked the generative AI boom with large language models trained on content from the web and powered by hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of computing power. But Hassabis has held firm to the idea that “world models” trained on simulations and the physical world around us will lead to the next leap forward.
Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun thought the same but couldn’t get Mark Zuckerberg to agree, and recently left the company. While Zuckerberg is chasing superintelligence by going all in on chatbots such as OpenAI, Google is hedging its bets by betting on scientists and potential paradigm-shifting technologies too.
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For a start, Sundar Pichai, the boss of Google parent Alphabet, merged the company’s two AI units under the leadership of Hassabis in 2023, surprising many who thought the California-based engineering lead Jeff Dean would get the job. Hassabis refused to move to Silicon Valley or adopt his employer’s go-to-market mindset, and he obsessed over scientific discovery. Yet from his base in London, he seemed to iron out the deep, trans-Atlantic rivalries between the two units that had stopped them progressing.
Then in August 2024, Google effectively spent $US2.7 billion to rehire Noam Shazeer, an eccentric scientific genius who co-invented the Transformer – a neural-network architecture that forms the backbone of modern AI, and is effectively the T in ChatGPT. He’d quit Google in 2021 because it refused to launch his chatbot program two years before OpenAI stunned the world with the same technology. When Shazeer came back last year, he was made technical co-lead for the Gemini chatbot and reported to Hassabis, an arrangement that on paper should not have worked out. Hassabis didn’t share Shazeer’s long-time obsession with LLMs as a path to AGI.
But Hassabis is also a former chess prodigy who likes to think four moves ahead, and he navigated his differences with Shazeer by employing charm and diplomacy. The stakes had become higher. “He’s in a hyper-capitalist race that he didn’t start, and now that he’s in it he’s determined to win,” says Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Infinity Machine, a forthcoming book on Hassabis and DeepMind. “Although there’s a big part of his personality that cares about the science there’s an equally significant part that cares about winning.”
