Demis Hassabis isn’t shying away from AI’s biggest questions

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In . For a decade, Google’s I/O developer conferences have told one consistent story : The AI age is here, and Google aims to lead it . The company’s progress can be measured by the AI-infused product announcements it makes during the show’s keynote. On Tuesday, CEO Sundar Pichai and other executives packed I/O 2026’s three-hour presentation so tightly with news—spanning Google Search, the Gemini app, Google Docs, Gmail, YouTube, Android, and beyond—that it threatened to explode. For one of those presenters, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis , this year’s announcements are part of a long arc of personal history dating back to his childhood fascination with teaching machines to think . In 2010, that quest led to Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman cofounding the artificial intelligence research lab DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 and merged with another research arm, Google Brain, in 2023. The journey will continue