How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis

How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis

From Y Combinator Startup Podcast by Y Combinator

April 29, 2026 · 41 min

About this episode

Demis Hassabis discusses his journey in tech, the path to AGI, and advice for founders in this episode.

Demis Hassabis has had one of the most extraordinary careers in tech. He started as a chess prodigy and video game designer at 17 before getting a PhD in neuroscience and going on to found DeepMind. His lab cracked Go, solved protein structure prediction with AlphaFold, and then gave it away free to every scientist on earth. That work won him the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Today he leads Google DeepMind, pushing toward the same goal he set as a teenager: AGI. On this special live episode of How to Build the Future, he sat down with YC's Garry Tan to talk about what still needs to happen to get us to AGI, his advice for founders on how to stay ahead of the curve and what the next big scientific breakthroughs might be. Chapters:00:00 — Intro00:46 — Demis Hassabis: From Chess Prodigy to DeepMind01:48 — What’s Missing Before We Get To AGI?03:36 — Why Memory Is Still Unsolved06:14 — How AlphaGo Shaped Gemini08:06 — Why Smaller Models Are Getting So Powerful10:46 — The 1000x Engineer12:40 — Continual Learning and the Future of Agents13:32 — Why AI Still Fails at Basic Reasoning15:33 — Are Agents Overhyped or Just Getting Started?18:31 — Can AI Become Truly Creative?20:26 — Open…

People in this episode

Host: Garry Tan

Guest: Demis Hassabis

Topics covered

  • AGI
  • DeepMind
  • AI advancements
  • scientific breakthroughs
  • founder advice

Keywords

  • AGI
  • DeepMind
  • AlphaFold
  • AlphaGo
  • Nobel Prize
  • AI
  • founders

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: DeepMind, Google DeepMind

Books & works: AlphaFold, AlphaGo

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