By Alyson Shontell
Publication Date: 2026-02-11 10:13:00
Good morning. We’re in the thick of the AI revolution. But we may look back on January 2014 as one the most pivotal moments in business history. That was the month Demis Hassabis sold his AI company, DeepMind, to Google.
He rebuffed a higher offer from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And the idea of Google owning something so powerful scared Elon Musk to such a degree that he decided to launch a rival company with Sam Altman: OpenAI.
Fast forward to today, and Demis is still the one to beat. He runs all of Google’s AI initiatives, including Gemini, which is quickly eating away at OpenAI’s user base.
In his spare time, Demis won a Nobel Prize for being able to accurately predict how proteins fold, and he runs a startup, Isomorphic, that wants to use AI to “solve all disease.”
Naturally, I wanted to meet this man to learn how he thinks and where he believes the AI world is heading. We sat down together at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where I asked him how he…
