How Demis Hassabis is leading Google through an innovator’s dilemma—and made OpenAI declare ‘code red’

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We’re in the thick of the AI revolution, but we might look back on January 2014 as one of the most pivotal moments in business history. That was the month that Demis Hassabis sold his AI company, DeepMind, to Google. He rebuffed a higher offer from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and the acquisition scared Elon Musk so much that he decided to launch a rival company with Sam Altman, now called OpenAI. 

Fast forward to today, and Hassabis is still the one to beat. He runs all of Google’s AI initiatives, including Gemini, which is quickly eating away at OpenAI’s user base. In his spare time, Hassabis won a Nobel Prize, and he runs a startup called Isomorphic that wants to solve all disease with AI. 

In a new episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell sat down with Demis at the World Economic Forum in Davos to learn where he thinks the future is heading.  Here’s some of what they discussed during their 45-minute conversation:

Hassabis has always been interested in things like astronomy, cosmology, physics as a kid, because he  always been interested in the big questions. What’s actually happening here in the universe? The nature of consciousness, all of these types of things. And then for him, for chess, he also loves games. He loves strategy. He ended up training his own mind by playing chess as a kid, very seriously. 

And then that got him thinking about thinking—and how does the brain work? And then he has combined all that together. That sort of led him to AI and computers, and AI being a way to understand our own minds, but also a perfect tool for science and understanding the universe out there.

Hassabis’ decision to sell DeepMind to Google.  We did, actually, those of us that were involved in the science. We started DeepMind in 2010, which was 15+ years ago now, and nobody was talking about AI. But we knew, and we set out with the mission of solving intelligence and then using it to solve everything else.   So we wanted to be the first company to build artificial general intelligence. And the main thing we wanted to apply it to was solving scientific problems. So when Google came along in 2014—and it was actually driven by Larry at the time, Larry Page, who was the CEO—we knew that in some ways we were sort of underselling.   But, on the other hand, what mattered to him was not the money, it was the mission, and being able to accelerate our progress towards artificial general intelligence and answering these scientific questions that we were trying to solve. And he felt that teaming up with Google would accelerate that, mostly because they had obviously enormous compute power, and we see today how important that is for developing intelligence.

The development of AlphaFold—and the spin-off of drug-discovery platform Isomorphic was another moon shot that got him to a Nobel Prize, folded all 200 million proteins known to science, and then put that on a huge database with the European Bioinformatics Institute. And for free, into the world for everyone to use. So now over 3 million researchers around the world make use of AlphaFold every day.

His one of the skills is bringing together amazing, world class interdisciplinary teams. He loved managing those teams. He loves composing those management teams together.  If we take Isomorphic, for example, we’ve blended top biologists and chemists along with top machine learning and engineering. And I think there’s a lot of magic that happens when you have these kinds of interdisciplinary groups. 

How Hassabis helped Google catch up to increased competition in the AI race  According to him, we had two world class groups in original DeepMind and Google Brain. And actually, he thinks often, as a collective, they don’t get enough credit for the fact that he thinks about 90% of the modern AI industries are built on technology or discoveries made by one of those two groups. From Transformers to AlphaGo and deep reinforcement learning. So we have, and we still have, I think, the deepest and broadest research bench. So we have incredible talent. I think, better than anywhere else in the world by a long way. 

He is a very collaborative person. He is very open minded about different ways of working and he always looking to improve as well. One of the watch words he lives by is this Japanese word, Kaizen, that he loves. Which is sort of striving for continual self-improvement. And that’s what he always try to do. 

And he thinks one of the things they did—one of the things he is very proud of—is getting the shipping culture going and sort of rediscovering, he guesses, the golden era of Google, back 10, 15 years ago and taking risks. Calculated risk, shipping things fast, and being innovative. And he thinks that’s all working out really well now, whilst at the same time being thoughtful and scientific about and rigorous about what we put out in the world, whether that’s engineering or scientifically. And he thinks, and he hopes, they are getting that balance right.

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