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# DeepMind

2026-10-15

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #30: Demis Hassabis

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, 2024 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, and product architect behind AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and Gemini. A chess master at age 13 and co-creator of the multi-million-selling game Theme Park at 16, he founded DeepMind in 2010 on a two-step roadmap — Step 1 Solve intelligence, Step 2 Use it to solve everything else. He shocked humanity with AlphaGo's Move 37 and transformed biology by folding all 200 million known proteins. Ranked #30 among the 100 PMs who changed the world, with an overall score of 90.55 (displayed as 91) — vision 97, originality 96, scale 92, taste 85, business 85, insight 82.

2026-08-06

AlphaGo's Demis Hassabis Steps Back From Running DeepMind Day-to-Day — and Google's Chief Scientist Walks Out the Same Day With Three Others

On August 5 Google announced that Demis Hassabis is becoming chair of Google DeepMind and handing off day-to-day operations. Alphabet fell more than 5%. Everyone talked about that. The same day carried another item almost nobody looked at closely: Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and 27-year veteran, left to start a company — taking Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals with him. Sanjay's name means little to most readers, yet he and Dean are the only two level 11 Senior Fellows Google has had in twenty-odd years, and they spent those years writing code hunched over the same computer. What Dean built in 27 years was all foundation: search index scaled 100×, Google's first ads system, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, the TPU program. That operating system assumes you have time to build foundations — and Google just moved the clock forward. Stranger still: Google didn't push him out. It invested in his new company and wants to sell him cloud.