Demis Hassabis

New Capabilities

Stepped back from daily operations on August 5

A billion people now open Google's Gemini assistant each month. Google said Tuesday the app passed that mark, its 14th product to reach a billion users and, by its own count, the fastest to get there.

Updated Aug 12

New Capabilities

Overseeing a model-per-quarter cadence: Gemini 3.1 Pro in February, Gemini 3.5 Flash in May (GA July 14), and Gemini 3.5 Pro expected in July 2026.

When Google launched Gemini 3 Flash in December 2025, it bet that a fast, cheap model could become the default brain of Search, the Gemini app, and developer tooling. That bet compounded. Google shipped Gemini 3.1 Pro in February 2026 and Gemini 3.5 Flash in May; the latter reached general availability on July 14 and is now the default across every major Google surface.

Updated Jul 15

New Capabilities

Expects Isomorphic Labs' first AI-designed drug candidates to enter clinical trials by end-2026, following $2.1 billion Series B raise

In January 2026, Tsinghua University researchers published DrugCLIP in Science, a system that screened 500 million drug compounds against 10,000 human proteins in under 24 hours on eight GPUs. The approach is 10 million times faster than conventional molecular docking, and the results are public in GenomeScreenDB, covering roughly half the human genome.

Updated Jun 27

New Capabilities

Leading Google's push into physical AI

For decades, industrial robots have been powerful but rigid. Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, released April 14, 2026, is the latest version of a new approach: it gives robots the flexible reasoning that powers chatbots, tailored to understand and act in physical space. Paired with an agentic vision system, it reads pressure gauges, thermometers, and digital readouts with 98% accuracy—a capability that emerged from collaboration with Boston Dynamics, which deploys the Spot robot in industrial facilities.

Updated May 31

New Capabilities

Led the Gemma 4 release strategy

For two years, the most capable artificial intelligence models lived behind paywalls and API meters. Google made that harder to justify on April 2, 2026, when it released Gemma 4: four open models ranging from 2 billion to 31 billion parameters. The models handle text, images, video, and audio under a fully permissive Apache 2.0 license with no usage restrictions. The competitive response was nearly immediate. Meta released Llama 5 just six days later, significantly ahead of its previously signaled Q3 2026 target. Chinese lab DeepSeek followed on April 24 with its V4 model, a 1.6 trillion-parameter system also shipped as open-source under an MIT license. What began as a bilateral licensing contest between Google and Meta has become a six-way open-model race.

Updated May 30

New Capabilities

Leading Google's AI-for-science strategy

Google released an AI system in February 2025 that proposes original hypotheses and refines them through internal debate among six specialized AI agents. The system reproduced a decade-long Imperial College London study on how antibiotic-resistance genes spread between bacterial species in 48 hours, without accessing their unpublished findings.

Updated May 30

New Capabilities

2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry; leads both DeepMind's research and its drug-discovery spinoff

Determining the three-dimensional shape of a protein used to take a graduate student an entire career. Google DeepMind released AlphaFold 4 in March 2026, extending progress from the original AlphaFold's 2018 win, with the system predicting multi-protein structures in minutes instead of hours or days.

Updated May 30

New Capabilities

2024 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry for AlphaFold

It took thirteen years and $2.7 billion to read the first human genome. Now a single AI model, trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs from more than 128,000 species, can predict whether an uncharacterized mutation in a breast cancer gene is dangerous with 90 percent accuracy without being trained on that gene.

Updated May 30

New Capabilities

Leading Google's AI efforts; 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry

OpenAI launched the first commercial reasoning model in September 2024. Seventeen months later, Google's upgraded Gemini 3 Deep Think pulled ahead on the benchmarks that matter most for science.

Updated May 29

New Capabilities

2024 Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry

For twenty years after scientists sequenced the human genome, 98% of it remained essentially unreadable. The protein-coding genes were mapped, but the vast regulatory regions—the genome's operating system—stayed opaque. On January 28, 2026, Google DeepMind released the full source code for AlphaGenome, an artificial intelligence model that predicts how genetic variants in these non-coding regions affect gene regulation and disease.

Updated May 26

New Capabilities

Leading DeepMind's reasoning breakthroughs and AGI research

OpenAI's GPT-5 dropped August 7, 2025, completing AI's shift from chatbots that string words together to systems that think through problems step-by-step. Google DeepMind's models won the International Math Olympiad by solving problems only five humans cracked, as Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, and every major AI lab raced to build reasoning models.

Updated May 19

New Capabilities

Leading development of self-improving AI systems, predicting AGI within 5-10 years

In May 2025, DeepMind's AlphaEvolve became the first commercial AI to optimize its own training—shaving 23% off a critical computation kernel. Since then, the loop has tightened: by April 2026, Anthropic's Claude agents were outperforming human alignment researchers on safety experiments, and GPT-5.5 had rewritten its own serving infrastructure to run 20% faster.

Updated May 19

New Capabilities

CEO of Google DeepMind; announced UK automated lab and Genesis DOE partnership

Science magazine named large language models doing frontier science a runner-up breakthrough of 2025. Within weeks, the prediction became reality: OpenAI's GPT-5.2 solved previously unsolved Erdős mathematics problems in 15 minutes, achieving 40% accuracy on expert-level mathematics that stumped earlier systems.

Updated May 19

New Capabilities

Runs all of Google's AI research and Gemini development

Sundar Pichai opened Google I/O 2026 with a Gemini model that can run a user's desktop. The keynote unveiled Android XR smart glasses too. Aluminium OS, a laptop platform merging Android and ChromeOS, will ship as 'Googlebooks' from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.

Updated May 19