Builder
Demis Hassabis
Chair, Google DeepMind; Chief Scientist, Alphabet
Demis Hassabis is co-founder of DeepMind and, since August 2026, chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He led DeepMind as CEO from its founding in London in 2010, through its acquisition by Google in 2014, and after its 2023 merger with Google Brain to form Google DeepMind.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Under his leadership the lab produced AlphaFold, which predicted the structures of nearly all human proteins and later more than 200 million proteins. For AlphaFold he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper. He was knighted in 2024 for services to artificial intelligence. He is also CEO and co-founder of Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI drug-discovery company, launched in 2021.
He introduced the Gemini model family in December 2023 as Google’s first natively multimodal model, built by Google DeepMind with teams across Google.
On 5 August 2026 Google announced that Hassabis would step back from day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the lab’s chief technology officer, took over operations as senior vice president reporting to Sundar Pichai. Hassabis became chair of the unit and Alphabet’s chief scientist, a role previously held by Jeff Dean, who left to co-found a startup. Reports said Hassabis would focus on AGI strategy and scientific applications of AI and spend more time at Isomorphic Labs. In a note at the time he wrote that he believes AGI is near.
Hassabis has generally framed the lab’s goal as artificial general intelligence rather than Super Intelligence.