Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 and now leads Google DeepMind, the group behind the Gemini and Gemma model families and the AlphaFold work that earned him a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For UK SMEs watching the “sovereign AI” conversation — where British compute, talent and open models sit relative to the US labs — Hassabis is the most consequential domestic voice.
DH
Demis Hassabis
Nobel laureate and CEO of Google DeepMind, steering frontier model research from the UK. The clearest anchor point for Britain's sovereign-AI ambitions and the science-first frontier.
What They're Saying Now
At Google I/O 2026: 'the foothills of the singularity' ↗
Hassabis told I/O that society has only a few years to prepare for AGI — which he still broadly expects around 2030 — and pointed to Gemini's new agentic 'Spark' direction, noting DeepMind's earliest work was itself agentic.
On the road to AGI: world models and automated experimentation ↗
In recent interviews he argues two pieces are still missing — AI that truly understands physics and space, and automated experimentation — which together would close the scientific research loop.
What's next for Google DeepMind ↗
A wide-ranging interview on where Gemini goes next, competition at the frontier, and what he believes still stands between today's models and AGI.
