Google’s Demis Hassabis is the man tasked with turning bleeding-edge AI research into profits
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.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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