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Google's fate hinges on this man: Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis is a celebrated name in artificial intelligence research. He’s a chess master and a neuroscientist. On Wall Street, he’s less known.

That may not be true for long. Hassabis is emerging as the face of Google’s mammoth AI effort and on Tuesday will take the stage at the annual developer’s conference, Google I/O, for the first time.

For an academic who’s credited with some of the most important breakthroughs in AI over the past decade, Hassabis is extremely clear on his task ahead: bring the latest AI technologies to every corner of the Google universe to serve its billions of users. 

“We’re like the engine room of the company,” Hassabis told CNBC, speaking about his newly integrated AI unit within Google. 

Last month, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai merged Hassabis’ DeepMind with Google Brain, a separate AI team, and selected Hassabis to lead the group. It’s now up to Hassabis to reestablish Google as the leader in generative AI after the company was caught off-guard by the rapid emergence of OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at a 2017 event in China.

Source: Alphabet

There may be no more important task at Google, especially as new generative AI services give consumers alternative and more creatives ways to search for information online. The business question is — can a longtime researcher like Hassabis be the person to ship products that consumers love?

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI,” says there’s no questioning Hassabis’ will to win.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody more competitive,” said Hinton, who advised Google to buy DeepMind about a decade ago. “Demis is competitive at the level of people who get gold medals in the Olympics.”

He formed that trait at any early age. Hassabis was a child chess prodigy who at one point was the No. 2 rated player in the world. He also competed in the World Series of Poker.

Hassabis says he has consumer experience on his side, too. At just 17 years old, he shipped a hit video game in the 1990s called “Theme Park.” Games at that time had to be fun and easy to navigate in order to succeed, Hassabis said. After Theme Park, he created his own video game company, Elixir Studios.

Hassabis would later go on to co-found DeepMind, which became widely recognized as the world’s leading AI research lab, attracting some of the most prominent experts in deep learning. When Google acquired the lab for a reported $500 million in 2014, DeepMind was given a long leash to operate independently.

Falling behind

Under Hassabis, DeepMind was known for developing its technology through games like Breakout and AlphaGo, an AI program that beat the world’s top Go player.

There was a practical reason for focusing on games. Hassabis told CNBC that “simulations are totally safe, have no consequences, but they can still learn from it.”

During his career at DeepMind and then at Google, Hassabis dominated the field of AI.

Even Tesla CEO Elon Musk would tell OpenAI co-founders in 2018 that they would need billions of dollars to have a chance of competing with Hassabis and Google.

Google, however, would lose that edge as rivals like OpenAI and Microsoft brought headline-making products like ChatGPT and Copilot to market. 

A person who has worked with Hassabis but wanted to remain anonymous said that, for a period of time, Hassabis may have been more interested in winning academic accolades than launching products people could use. Nature magazine, one of the most influential scientific journals in the world, has featured Hassabis’ work many times over the past decade.

“Accolades were never the end goal,” DeepMind said in a statement to CNBC. “They simply reflect the importance and impact of the research they recognized.”

One of DeepMind’s most important products, AlphaFold, was a groundbreaking piece of technology that used AI to help scientists predict the structure of proteins, a massive challenges in biology for decades.

DeepMind open sourced AlphaFold, essentially giving it away for free.

In 2017, a team of Google researchers, separate from DeepMind, published a breakthrough study on Transformers, a way for AI models to better process the texts used for training.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (R) speaks as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (L) looks on during the OpenAI DevDay event in San Francisco on Nov. 6, 2023.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

That jumpstarted the wave of AI innovation that followed, notably at OpenAI. Transformers is the “T” in ChatGPT.

Critics have argued that Google was giving away key products and research, and helping its biggest competitors.

“They had the lead and they’ve been very cautious,” Hinton said. “They’ve been very cautious both about generative AI images, and about the large language models. And when OpenAI teamed up with Microsoft and ChatGPT was being used by Microsoft, Google couldn’t afford to be cautious anymore.”

Hassabis and Google went on offense.

The Washington Post reported in May 2023 that Google was internally announcing a big departure from previous policy. Employees had to stop sharing their research with the world, only publishing papers after the research had been turned into products.

AlphaFold became a huge business opportunity, securing commercial partners like Eli Lilly and Novartis for drug discovery.

During a TED talk, Hassabis said the ChatGPT moment demonstrated that the public found value in LLMs and was ready to embrace them.

“When we’re working on these systems, mostly you’re focusing on the flaws and the things they don’t do and hallucinations,” he said. “We wanted to improve those things first before putting them out. But interestingly, it turned out that even with those flaws, many tens of millions of people still find them very useful.”

Hassabis said that it was time to bring these products “beyond the rarefied world of science.”

Now investors are waiting to see if Google can accomplish what they view as the most important feat, and turn that bleeding-edge science into profits.

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

WATCH: Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

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