While many CEOs set their alarm clocks for a 5 a.m. wake-up time, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has just hit the pillow after his second work shift of the day.
“I don’t sleep very much,” Hassabis recently said on Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast with editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. “I do try and get six [hours], but I have unusual sleeping habits I sort of manage during the day. [I] try and pack my day in the office with as many meetings as possible, back-to-back, almost no time, no break between.”
The AI pioneer has been on a winning streak since 2014, when he sold his AI company, DeepMind, to tech behemoth Google. The acquisition itself stoked fear among his competitors; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s higher offer was declined, and outraged by the deal, fellow tech mogul Elon Musk launched OpenAI with Sam Altman as a countermeasure.
A decade later, Hassabis oversees all of Google’s AI ventures, including its popular tool Gemini. And in what little spare time he has, Hassabis also won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2024, while leading a startup aiming to solve disease with AI: Isomorphic Labs.
Yet after a long day of work running DeepMind, the CEO still isn’t ready to catch some well-deserved shut-eye. Once his daytime shift is over, he takes a short break before delving right back into his job—with no meetings or distractions to interrupt his flow.
