Demis Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of the machine learning start-up DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Hassabis was one of the AI leaders who co-signed the safe.ai open letter calling for mitigation of societal risks caused by AI to be as highly prioritised as that of pandemics and nuclear war. When speaking to Time magazine following the recent opening of DeepMind’s London headquarters, urged caution around artificial intelligence development, commenting: “Although we work on making machines smart, we wanted to keep humanity at the centre of what we’re doing here.” The tech leader went on to claim that AI was “on the cusp” of potentially creating tools that could prove harmful to society.

With the company aiming to unleash the potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – widely regarded as the next phase in AI development – Hassabis said that this would serve as an “epoch-defining” technology akin to the discovery of electricity.