“The ultimate goal was to build AI and understand the mind, then use it to understand science. Step one, solve intelligence. Step two, solve everything else.” — Demis Hassabis, who was just named WSJ Magazine’s 2026 Technology Innovator in a new The Wall Street Journal feature about his lifelong quest to solve the world’s mysteries with artificial intelligence. Learn more ⬇️
You can learn a lot about the people racing to build the world’s most powerful technology by asking what keeps them up at night. In the case of Demis Hassabis, it’s not just the complexities of AI. He’s wide awake when he should be asleep because the middle of the night also happens to be his favorite time to work. In the small hours of the morning, his brain is loose, the world is silent, and he can read, think deeply and really focus on the problems he’s spent a lifetime trying to solve. Ever since he was a boy, WSJ. Magazine’s 2026 Technology Innovator Hassabis dreamed of building a form of artificial intelligence that would be smart enough to crack the mysteries of the universe. When he started the research lab that became Google DeepMind, he turned his life’s obsession into the mission of his company. AI can already write code and rewrite emails and summarize meetings and prove abstract math conjectures and figure out why your washing machine keeps making that strange beeping noise. But in Hassabis’s mind, the whole point of intelligence is to do something with it. What he wants to do with it is make the kind of discoveries that actually change our lives. Read more from The Innovators Issue of WSJ. Magazine: 🔗 https://on.wsj.com/4zLFck8