Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis used to get some of his most fulfilling work done between midnight and 3 a.m. A self-described “nocturnal person,” the Londoner devoted the solitude of his overnight shift to catching up on scientific papers, coming up with new ideas, and just plain thinking.
Lately, however, even Hassabis’s wee hours are in demand. Much of his team is now based at Google’s home turf in Silicon Valley, where it’s eight hours earlier. As a consequence, video meetings for him often stretch into the new day. “I had a really good routine until about 18 months ago,” he says wistfully.
His cherished quiet time was disrupted by the creation of Google DeepMind, often called GDM within the company. The organization is the result of the April 2023 merger of two existing Google AI research arms: DeepMind, which Hassabis cofounded with Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg in 2010 and sold to Google in 2014, and Google Brain, which Google itself formed in 2011. Google Brain chief Jeff Dean became Google’s chief scientist, while Hassabis was named to head the combined research entity—arguably AI’s most formidable brain trust.
It’s an enormous responsibility. Though Google has talked about being an AI-first company for years, it was OpenAI that set off the current generative AI frenzy with the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Google—for all its technical wherewithal—has been scrambling since then to establish itself as a leader in turning the emerging technology into actual products. It’s racing against innumerable others, including Microsoft, OpenAI’s flagship partner (and Suleyman’s current employer; the company appointed him to head a new consumer AI unit in March, in a deal that also involved paying $650 million to license technology created by Inflection AI, the startup he cofounded after leaving Google in 2022).
