Newsroom
One of the most influential people shaping the future of artificial intelligence has roots much closer to home than Silicon Valley.
Sir Demis Hassabis, the London-born Nobel Prize winner whose father is a Greek Cypriot from Famagusta, is stepping down from the day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind and moving into a wider role that could give him even greater influence over the future of AI.
Hassabis will become chair of Google DeepMind, the pioneering AI laboratory he co-founded, while also taking over as chief scientist of Alphabet, Google's parent company, according to an announcement Wednesday.
For Cyprus, there is a particularly striking connection. Hassabis was born in London in 1976 to a Greek Cypriot father from Famagusta and a Singaporean mother, growing up in north London before becoming one of the world's best-known scientists and technology entrepreneurs. His Cypriot heritage was highlighted again when he won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for groundbreaking work using AI to predict the structures of proteins.
Now, at 50, the former child chess prodigy is moving into a job concerned less with running meetings and managing an organization and more with a question that could eventually affect almost everyone: What happens when AI becomes vastly more powerful than it is today?
Hassabis said he wants to step back from DeepMind's daily operations to concentrate on the bigger picture, particularly artificial general intelligence, or AGI, the still-theoretical point at which an AI system would be capable of performing a very broad range of intellectual tasks rather than being designed primarily for specific ones.
He believes that moment is getting closer.
In a message to staff, Hassabis described humanity as being at a "pivotal moment" and said his focus would be on helping ensure increasingly powerful AI develops in a way that benefits society.
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the two had been discussing for some time how to give Hassabis the freedom to concentrate fully on shaping the future of AGI. Google's announcement makes clear that Hassabis is not leaving DeepMind. Instead, he is giving up much of its daily management while moving higher into Alphabet's scientific leadership.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, a longtime DeepMind executive who has served as its chief technology officer, will take charge of the organization as senior vice president of Google DeepMind.
The change comes at a particularly intense moment in the AI race.
Google was one of the companies responsible for much of the research on which today's AI boom was built, but it has faced fierce competition from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and Anthropic, the maker of Claude. DeepMind itself has also lost several prominent researchers as the battle for AI talent has intensified.
Hassabis, however, has been associated with some of the field's most important breakthroughs.
DeepMind was established in London in 2010 and bought by Google four years later for about £400 million. Its AlphaGo system stunned the technology world by becoming the first AI program to defeat elite human players at Go, a board game long considered extraordinarily difficult for computers to master.
Then came AlphaFold.
The system used AI to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins, tackling a scientific problem researchers had wrestled with for decades. The achievement ultimately helped earn Hassabis and fellow DeepMind scientist John Jumper half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The laboratory that began as an ambitious London AI start-up has since become central to Google's attempt to stay ahead in perhaps the most consequential technology race in decades.
The restructuring extends beyond Hassabis. Jeff Dean, Google's longtime chief scientist, is leaving to establish a new research venture backed by Google, while DeepMind is becoming increasingly integrated with Google's wider AI operation.
For Hassabis, though, the move appears to be less about stepping away than stepping back far enough to see the entire playing field, perhaps fitting for someone who first made his name as a chess prodigy.
And for Cyprus, there is something remarkable in the trajectory: a family story that stretches back to Famagusta now sits, through Hassabis, remarkably close to one of the biggest scientific questions of the century, who will shape the future of artificial intelligence, and what that future will look like.
*With information from the Financial Times
