Demis Hassabis
46 statements across 12 episodes · 23 bullish · 6 bearish · 7 people on the record · first statement Sep 13, 2024 by Parmy Olson · said 145 times in 47 episodes since 2023 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Demis Hassabis's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Alex Kantrowitz (98), M.G. Siegler (19), Stephen Morris (6), Geoffrey Hinton (4), Aaron Levie (4), Thomas Kurian (3), Ranjan Roy (3), Parmy Olson (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 85 mentions in 19 episodes 4 per episode
- Demis Steps Down, Apple’s Memory Problem, Microsoft’s Clever Trick
- OpenAI’s $50 Billion Fundraise, AI Advertising Game Theory, Apple’s AI Wearable Pin
- Can AI Become Conscious? — With Michael Pollan
- How Google DeepMind Operates & Experiments — With Lila Ibrahim and James Manyika
- AI’s Steve Jobs?, Big Tech AI Chaos, 2026 Crystal Ball
- More OpenAI C-Suite Drama, Is Siri Seriously Broken?, Meta’s Elusive Next Hit
- Is Google's Gemini Winning?, Thinking Machines Drama, Claude Cowork’s Potential
- AI Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton: AI Is Conscious, Superintelligence is Coming, And We Should Be Worried
- 11 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 42 mentions in 23 episodes 2 per episode
- OpenAI's Jony Ive Moment, Anthropic's Big New Model, Google In AI Mode
- OpenAI’s Windsurf Crash, Grok’s Wild Week, Replace Tim Cook? — With Aaron Levie
- How DeepSeek Changes AI Research & Silicon Valley w/ M.G. Siegler
- Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on AI Competition, Agents, And Tariffs
- Roblox CEO: We Want AI To Generate Full Games
- Tim Cook’s Final Year?, Big Tech Horse Race, Anthropic’s Profitability Push
- Countdown to GPT-5, OpenAI’s Stargate Sputters, AI Math Wars
- Google DeepMind CTO: Advancing AI Frontier, New Reasoning Methods, Video Generation’s Potential
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 17 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
- Is OpenAI’s New “o1” Model The Big Step Forward We’ve Been Waiting For?
- Anthropic's Co-Founder on AI Agents, General Intelligence, and Sentience — With Jack Clark
- Peter Diamandis — Embracing AI, Befriending Elon, And Living Forever
- AI Scaling, Alignment, and the Path to Superintelligence — With Dwarkesh Patel
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Demis Hassabis, oldest first
Sep 13, 2024 neutral
Demis Hassabis Spent Years Trying to Separate DeepMind Into a Non-Profit
“Demis tried to break away from Google and also become something like a non-profit. He spent years trying to do that, and spent a lot of money and time trying to do that, and they both failed to create these structures of Responsible governance.”
Sep 13, 2024 positive
Olson: Hassabis Was First to Launch an AGI-Focused Company in 2010
“Demis did it first. He was actually the first kind of put his neck on the line as a among the scientific community to do something that was really a fringe theory back in the, in 2010 and started a company that actually wanted to build human level AI.”
Sep 13, 2024 neutral
Jan 23, 2025
Demis Hassabis says knowledge compression cannot solve novel math without planning
“Just understanding the world's information, and then trying to sort of almost compress that into your memory, that's not enough for solving a novel math problem, or a novel, novel conjecture. So there, you know, we start needing to bring in, I think we talked …”
Jan 23, 2025 bearish
Jan 23, 2025 neutral
Demis Hassabis sees 50 percent chance AGI requires new architectural breakthroughs
“Maybe we need one or two more transformer-like breakthroughs. And I, and I'm, I think I'm genuinely uncertain about that. So that's why I say 50%. So I mean, I wouldn't be surprised either way if we got there with existing techniques and things we already knew…”
Jan 23, 2025 bullish
Demis Hassabis confirms AI scaling returns are slowing but remain substantial
“My view is that we are getting substantial returns, but not, but it's slowing vis-a-vis, but it would have to, I mean, it's not just continuing to be exponential, but that doesn't mean the scaling is not working. It's absolutely working.”
Jan 23, 2025 neutral
Jan 23, 2025 bearish
Jan 23, 2025
Demis Hassabis says ambiguity limits self-improving AI outside math and games
“Maths, and even coding, and games, these are areas, they're quite special, ah, ah, areas of knowledge, because you can verify if the answer is correct. Right. In all of those domains, right. The math, you know, the final answer the AI system puts out, you can …”
Jan 23, 2025 bullish
Demis Hassabis predicts AI will eventually discover room-temperature superconductors
“I think well I heard that we actually think there are some superconductor materials. I doubt they're room temperature ones though, but I think at some point, if it's possible with physics an AI system will one day find it.”
Jan 23, 2025 bullish
Jan 27, 2025 bearish
Demis Hassabis acknowledges AI progress is slowing and taking longer
“Even Demis, you know, when you talk to him, he noted that he doesn't necessarily believe in, in, you know, a wall being hit, but he did acknowledge that things are slowing and it'll just take longer to get more, you know, juice out of the squeeze as it were.”
May 21, 2025 bullish
May 21, 2025 positive
Hassabis: Test-time compute elevated AlphaZero from master level to superhuman
“We had versions of AlphaGo and AlphaZero with the thinking turned off, so it was just the model telling you its first idea. And, you know, it's not bad, it's maybe like master level, something like that, but then if you turn the thinking on, it's way beyond wo…”
May 21, 2025 positive
Hassabis: First AGI systems must be safe to spawn secure derivative architectures
“Assuming there is one, you know, there probably will be some organizations that get there first, and I think it's important to, that those first systems are built reliably and safely, and I think after that, if that's the case, you know, we can imagine using t…”
May 21, 2025 neutral
May 21, 2025 positive
Hassabis: Web will transform into an agent-first architecture within years
“I do think the web, I think in nearer term, the web is going to change quite a lot if you think about an agent first web. Like, does it really need to, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to see renders and things like we do as humans using the web, so I thi…”
May 21, 2025 bullish
Hassabis: Test-time compute and inference will require vast data center capacity
“We're going to need a lot of data centers for serving, and also for inference time compute. Giving, you know, you saw DeepThink today, T.P.P. Pro DeepThink. The more time you give it, the better it will be, and certain tasks, very high value, very difficult ta…”
May 21, 2025 neutral
May 21, 2025 neutral
Hassabis: AGI Must Understand Emotion but Emulating It May Be Undesirable
“I think it will need to understand emotion. I don't know if I think it will be a sort of almost a design decision if we wanted to mimic emotions. I think there's no, I don't see any reason why it couldn't in theory. But it might be different or we might, it mi…”
May 21, 2025 bullish
Hassabis: Universal assistant is the killer app for smart glasses
“I feel like the universal assistant is the killer app for smart glasses, and I think that's what's going to make it work, apart from the fact that it's all, the tech, the hardware technology has also moved on, and Improved a lot. Is this, I think, I feel like …”
May 21, 2025 neutral
May 21, 2025 bullish
Hassabis: Tool use during test-time reasoning will be extremely powerful
“Especially if you think about, obviously, with an AI, during its thinking process, it can also use a bunch of tools, or even other AIs in, during that thinking process to improve what the final output is. So I think it's gonna be an incredibly powerful paradig…”
Jul 14, 2025 bullish
Levie: Google is not going to lose the AI coding battle
“This is a company that has A great operator in Sundar, an incredible, you know, AI innovator in, in Demis Jeff Dean, you know, deep on research and science, and then now this kind of hardcore founder in Sergei, like this is not a company that is going to lose …”
Jan 23, 2026 positive
Hassabis: Top Go player reached record Elo learning from AlphaGo
“The best South Go player in the world is a South Korean, and he was about 15, I think, when AlphaGo match happened. He's in his mid-twenties now, and he's by far the strongest player there's ever, Been by the ELO ratings, because he's learned natively, young e…”
Jan 23, 2026 neutral
Jan 23, 2026 bearish
Hassabis: Today's AI systems are nowhere near true human-level invention
“And today's systems, in my opinion, are nowhere near that. Doesn't matter how many, you know, Erdos problems you solve, which for some reason, you know, I mean, you know, that's, it's good that we're doing those things, but I think it's far, far from what you …”
Jan 23, 2026 bullish
DeepMind Plans to Converge All Modalities Into One Unified Gemini Model
“Why this is why we worked with Gemini as being multimodal from the beginning, able to deal with, you know, video, image and eventually converge that all into one model, that's our plan, is that it'll be very useful for a universal assistant as well.”
Jan 23, 2026 bullish
Hassabis: AI Has Significant Headroom Using Existing Architectures and Data
“Actually it turns out you can wring more more juice out of the existing Architectures and data. So there's plenty of room, I think, and we're still seeing that in both the pre-training, the post-training, and the thinking paradigms, and also the way that they …”
Jan 23, 2026 bullish
Demis Hassabis Rejects Yann LeCun's Stance That LLMs Are A Dead End
“No matter what camp you're in, we're gonna need Large foundation models as the key component of the final AGI systems. Of that, I'm sure. So, I don't, I'm not subscriber to someone like Jan LeCun who thinks, you know, that there's sort of some kind of dead end…”
Jan 23, 2026 positive
Hassabis: Reaching AGI Will Require One or Two More Fundamental Breakthroughs
“I'm definitely a subscriber to the idea that maybe we need one or two more big breakthroughs before we'll get to AGI, and I think they're along the lines of things like continual learning, better memory, longer context windows, or perhaps more efficient contex…”
Jan 23, 2026 negative
Hassabis: AGI Must Mean Matching All Human Cognitive Capabilities
“I don't think AGI should be sort of turned into a marketing term or for commercial gain. I think there is always been a scientific definition of that. My definition of that is a system that that can exhibit all the cognitive capabilities humans can. And I mean…”
Jan 23, 2026 neutral
Hassabis: Continual learning that updates models over time has not been cracked
“But I think to have it you want to do it more than just having your data in the context window. That's you want to have something a bit deeper than that, which is, as you say, actually changes the model over time. That's what ideally you would have. And that t…”
Jan 23, 2026 neutral
Jan 23, 2026 positive
Hassabis: World models are essential for AGI and long-term planning
“And then, of course, that would be, I think, essential for a GI, because that would allow these systems to plan, long-term plan, in the real world over, perhaps, very long time horizons, which, of course, we as humans can do, you know I'll spend four years get…”
Jan 23, 2026 bullish
Hassabis: Post-human AGI will discover room-temperature superconductors and new energy sources
“I mean, that's what to me is, it would be the AGI moment is, you know, then it will discover a new superconductor, room temperature superconductor that's possible in the laws of physics, but we just haven't found that needle in the haystack. Or a new source of…”
Jan 23, 2026 bullish
Hassabis: Vibe Coding Will Enable Creatives to Build Software Independently
“I think it will open up the whole productivity space to designers, creatives, artists that maybe would have had to work with teams about access to teams of programmers. Now they can probably do, you know, a lot more just on their own.”
Jan 23, 2026 positive
Hassabis: General Learning Across Any Domain Is The Defining Feature of AGI
“Learning is a critical part of agenda of AGI. It's actually almost the defining feature. When we say general, we mean general learning. Can it learn new knowledge and can it learn across any domain? That's the general part. So for me, learning is synonymous wi…”
Jan 26, 2026 neutral
Hassabis: Google Has No Immediate Plans for Ads in Gemini
“He said we have no plan at no plans at the moment to do ads. If you're talking about the Gemini app specifically, I think we're obviously going to watch very carefully the outcome of what ChatGPT is saying they're going to do. I think that has to be handled ve…”
Feb 16, 2026
Adler: Hassabis and Amodei would slow AI pace if they were sole players
“And so at Davos a few weeks ago, I think both Demis and Dario said some variation of, yeah, like if we were the only two groups building this technology, We would find a way to get together and figure out how to slow down this frantic pace. Like it's going too…”
Feb 18, 2026 positive
Ibrahim: Hassabis greenlit infusing learning science into Gemini when model matured
“Over the past few years, we've been doing a lot of work around one science area, learning science. How do people learn and can we improve it? And then this year was really, Dennis was like, okay, Gemini is good enough. It's time to infuse Everything we've done…”
Apr 10, 2026 negative
Aug 10, 2026 neutral
Demis Hassabis Steps Down as Google DeepMind CEO in Leadership Shakeup
“Demis Asabas is stepping down as chief executive for Google DeepMind to become chairman and chief scientist. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post on X. Google DeepMind technology chief Koray Kavukcholu is taking on responsibility for all AI model developmen…”
Aug 10, 2026 positive
Kantrowitz: Demis Hassabis Refocusing on Fundamental Science Is Good for AI
“So I actually think it's good for AI that Demis will be focusing more on the scientific side, probably more on the world model side and not deeply in LLM. So you'll have basically the talent that open AI and anthropic and potentially what's left of the AI orga…”