When Sir Demis Hassabis said AI had brought the world to a "pivotal moment in human history" last month, he knew another big change was imminent. This shift was closer to home. The Nobel prize-winning head of Google DeepMind, Google's AI unit, announced this week he was relinquishing his day-to-day duties as chief executive and becoming chair. He is also taking on the role of chief scientist at DeepMind's parent, Alphabet. Hassabis and DeepMind have been key players in AI's breakthrough era.

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Demis Hassabis, chief executive officer of Google DeepMind, attends a memorandum of understanding signing ceremony in Seoul on April 27. Alphabet Inc.'s Google is losing some of its most prominent artificial intelligence veterans in a seismic overhaul that is casting doubt over leadership in a critical area of growth right as competition intensifies. Alphabet shares fell 4% on the news. Jeff Dean, a longtime Google employee central to the development of the company's AI strategy, is departing to launch a startup, taking several high-profile colleagues with him. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, is moving into a chairman role at the lab.

Plus: SpaceX is now valued higher than Amazon. Solar geoengineering, the controversial idea that we could deliberately intervene in the climate system to counteract global warming, is moving beyond computer simulations and into the practical engineering challenges required to make it real. Researchers are now working on aircraft, materials, and other systems for solar geoengineering. But as they delve into these details, they're finding that even early deployment would require significant new infrastructure, time, and investment. Find out what happens when solar geoengineering encounters the realities of trying to cool the planet . Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception.

The CEO of Google DeepMind tells WIRED that companies should use the productivity gains of AI to do more, not lay people off. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, is keen to talk about the coding skills of his company's newest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. The model has been trained to perform complex agentic coding tasks: translate large code bases from one language to another; find and fix bugs lurking deep in knotty code; and even write entire operating systems from scratch. Hassabis does not, however, think this spells doom for software developers. "I have no idea why people are going around talking with certainty about that," Hassabis tells WIRED ahead of the new model reveal at today's Google's I/O event .

I t was March 2016, and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the world was gathered to watch the culmination of a battle 2,500 years in the making. On one side was the South Korean Lee Se-dol, the second-highest ranking Go player in the world. On the other was AlphaGo - a computer program developed by London-based artificial intelligence research company DeepMind. "Chess is the greatest game mankind has invented," game designer Alex Randolph once said. "Go is the greatest game mankind has discovered."

Gemini 3 is skilled at reasoning, generating video, and writing code. Amid talk of an AI bubble, Google notes the new model could help increase search revenue too. Google has introduced Gemini 3, its smartest artificial intelligence model to date, with cutting-edge reasoning, multimedia, and coding skills. As talk of an AI bubble grows, the company is keen to stress that its latest release is more than just a clever model and chatbot--it's a way of improving Google's existing products, including its lucrative search business, starting today. "We are the engine room of Google, and we're plugging in AI everywhere now," Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, an AI-focused subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet, told WIRED in an interview ahead of the announcement.

In the old Camden Town Hall opposite London's St Pancras station, away from the white tie and tails of the pageantry at Windsor Castle, was perhaps the most substantive display of the consequences of Donald Trump's state visit. In front of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, many members of the British and US cabinets and the cream of the European tech industry, a highly-crafted video played, featuring the long history of UK science. It included George Stephenson, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and Sir Demis Hassabis, with dozens of UK start-up companies from every corner of the country listed. It was a cross between a UK government investment promotion video and the Danny Boyle 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony, except for one crucial detail - it was voiced by Jensen Huang, the American Nvidia artificial intelligence (AI) and microchip magnate. This week, Trump said the tech tycoon was taking over the world and the boss of the company, which hit a market value of $4tn (£2.9tn) this summer, appears to have gone all-in on the UK in quite an extraordinary way.

The head of Google’s DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of ‘incredible productivity’ and ‘radical abundance’. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had moved more slowly?

Hassabis received half of the award alongside a colleague, John Jumper, for the design of AlphaFold: an AI tool that can predict the 3D structure of proteins using only their amino acid sequences--something Hassabis describes as a "50-year grand challenge" in the field of biology. Released freely by Google DeepMind for the world to use five years ago, AlphaFold has revolutionized the work of scientists toiling on research as varied as malaria vaccines, human longevity, and cures for cancer, allowing them to model protein structures in hours rather than years. The Nobel Prizes in 2024 were the first in history to recognize the contributions of AI to the field of science. If Hassabis gets his way, they won't be the last. AlphaFold's impact may have been broad enough to win its creators a Nobel Prize, but in the world of AI, it is seen as almost hopelessly narrow.