Hassabis Steps Down as DeepMind CEO to Focus on Curing All Diseases with AI
TansuYegen · x · 2026-08-10
Nobel laureate and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis has stepped down from his day-to-day CEO role, becoming chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist to focus on his AI drug discovery startup, Isomorphic Labs.
Hassabis believes AGI is only a few years away and wants to dedicate his time to the scientific questions that will follow. His ultimate ambition is to use AI to cure all human diseases within the next 20 years, expecting AI to deliver 6 to 12 more breakthroughs on the scale of AlphaFold.
While AlphaFold dramatically advanced protein structure prediction—with its database containing over 200 million structures—Hassabis notes it hasn't completely solved biology or drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs aims to computationally understand biological targets, predict molecular interactions, and design drugs, compressing years of lab trial-and-error into months or weeks. However, human trials and regulatory approvals will remain major bottlenecks.
Related event: Hassabis Steps Down as DeepMind CEO to Focus on Curing Diseases(2 posts)→
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