Demis Hassabis is a Nobel Prize winner and CEO of Google DeepMind. He is one of the most important people alive on what is quickly becoming the biggest technological advance of our lifetime.
Because the biggest way AI is going to impact your life, you can’t see. It’s not a chatbot or an image generator. It’s the tools he and his team are building that are invisible to you, in new drug design, nuclear fusion, natural disasters detection, quantum computers.
So who Demis is and what he chooses to build matters a lot. And he’s fascinating a childhood chess prodigy who at 17 turned down a reportedly million dollar job offer from a gaming company to go to college instead, and then get a PhD in neuroscience. He founded his company DeepMind with a mission to “solve intelligence”, starting with beating video games. He sold that company to Google specifically because they promised to let DeepMind focus on scientific research.
But as this has turned into the most intense technological battle in recent history, Demis is now in charge of much much more. He’s now behind basically everything Google does in AI.
He’s making decisions that affect your life and millions of other lives every single day.
So what is he planning to do with all that power? My goal is to show you the future Demis Hassabis wants to build, so you can decide for yourself what you think of it.
Welcome to HUGE* Conversations. This interview was recorded on March 5, 2026 in London.