The Future of Intelligence with Demis Hassabis (Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind)

**Demis Hassabis** (0:04)
I'm basically doing everything I ever dreamed of. And we're at the absolute frontier of science in so many ways, applied science as well as machine learning. And that's exhilarating, that feeling of being at the frontier and discovering something for the first time.

**Hannah Fry** (0:22)
Welcome to Google DeepMind the podcast with me, Professor Hannah Fry. It has been an extraordinary year for AI. We have seen the center of gravity shift from large language models to agentic AI. We've seen AI accelerate drug discovery and multi-modal models integrated into robotics and driverless cars. These are all topics that we've explored in detail on this podcast. But for the final episode of this year, we wanted to take a broader view, something beyond the headlines and product launches, to consider a much bigger question. Where is all this heading really? What are the scientific and technological questions that will define the next phase? And someone who spends quite a lot of their time thinking about that is Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind.
Welcome back to the podcast, Demis. Lovely to see you again.

**Demis Hassabis** (1:13)
Great to be back.

**Hannah Fry** (1:14)
I mean, quite a lot has happened in the last year.

**Demis Hassabis** (1:16)
Yes.

**Hannah Fry** (1:18)
What's sort of the biggest shift, do you think?

**Demis Hassabis** (1:20)
Oh, wow. I mean, it's just so much has happened, as you said. It feels like we packed in 10 years in one year.
I think a lot has happened. I mean, certainly for us, the progress of the models, we've just released Gemini 3, which we're really happy with, multimodal capabilities, all of those things have just advanced really well. And then probably the thing, I guess, over the summer that I'm very excited about is world models being advanced. I'm sure we're going to talk about that.

**Hannah Fry** (1:44)
Yeah, absolutely. We will get on to all of that stuff in a bit more detail in a moment. I remember the very first time I interviewed you for this podcast and you were talking about the root node problems about this idea that you can use AI to kind of unlock these downstream benefits. And you've made pretty good on your promise, I have to say. Do you want to give us an update on where we are with those? One of the things that are just around the corner and the things that you've sort of sold or near sold.

**Demis Hassabis** (2:07)
Yeah. Well, of course, obviously, the big proof point was Alpha Fold. And sort of crazy to think we're coming up to like five year sort of anniversary of Alpha Fold being sort of announced to the world Alpha Fold 2 at least. So that was the proof, I guess, that it was possible to do these root node type of problems. And we're exploring all the other ones now. I think material science, I'd love to do a room temperature superconductor and better batteries, these kinds of things. I think that's on the cards, better materials of all sorts. We're also working on fusion.

**Hannah Fry** (2:37)
Is this a new partnership that's been announced?

**Demis Hassabis** (2:39)
Yeah. We've just announced partnership with a deep one. We already were collaborating with them, but it's a much deeper one now with Commonwealth Fusion who I think are probably the best startup working on at least traditional tokamak reactors.
So they're probably closest to having something viable, and we want to help accelerate that, helping them contain the plasma in the magnets and maybe even some material design there as well. So that's exciting. And then we're collaborating also with our quantum colleagues, which they're doing amazing work at the quantum AI team at Google. And we're helping them with error correction codes, where we're using our machine learning to help them. And then maybe one day they'll help us.

**Hannah Fry** (3:16)
Perfect.

**Demis Hassabis** (3:16)
Yes, exactly.

**Hannah Fry** (3:18)
The fusion one is particularly, I mean, the difference that would make to the world, that would be unlocked by that is gigantic.

**Demis Hassabis** (3:24)
Yeah. I mean, fusion has always been the holy grail. Of course, I think solar is very promising too, right? Effectively using the fusion reactor in the clouds in the sky. But I think if we could have modular fusion reactors, you know, this promise of almost unlimited, renewable, clean energy would be obviously transform everything. And that's the holy grail. And of course, that's one of the ways we could help with climate.

**Hannah Fry** (3:46)
It does make a lot of our existing problems sort of disappear if we can.

**Demis Hassabis** (3:50)