'It feels like a watershed moment for AI'

Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on his Nobel Prize

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Madhumita Murgia LONDON - In the 15 years since it was founded, Google DeepMind has grown into one of the world's foremost artificial intelligence (Al) research and development labs. In October, its chief executive and co-founder, Sir Demis Hassabis, was one of three joint recipients of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024 for unlocking a 50-year-old problem - predicting the structure of every known protein - using AI software known as AlphaFold.

DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014, was founded with the mission of "solving" intelligencedesigning AI systems that could mimic and even supersede human cognitive capabilities. In recent years, the technology has become increasingly powerful and ubiquitous and is now embedded in industries ranging from healthcare and education to financial and government services.

In 2023, the London-based lab merged with Google Brain, the tech giant's own AI lab headquartered in California, to take on stiff competition from its peers in the tech industry, in the race to create powerful AI.

DeepMind's new positioning at the centre of Google's AI development was spurred by OpenAl's ChatGPT, the Microsoft-backed group's chatbot that provides plausible and nuanced text responses to questions.

Despite its commercial underpinnings, Google DeepMind has remained focused on complex and fundamental problems in science and engineering, making it one of the most consequential projects in AI globally.

Dr Hassabisa child chess prodigy, designer of cult video game Theme Park, and a trained neuroscientist - spoke to the Financial Times' Madhumita Murgia just 24 hours after being announced as a Nobel Prize winner. He talked extensively about the big puzzles he wants to crack next, the role of AI in scientific progress, his views on the path to artificial general intelligence and what will happen when we get there.