DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis was a constant figure of fear among Musk and other OpenAI higher-ups.
About a week into the Musk v. Altman trial, we’ve heard from some of the most powerful people in tech — including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Elon Musk’s fixer Jared Birchall, and Musk himself. But one of the most prominent characters is hovering around the margins: Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.
Hassabis is the architect of Google’s in-house AI lab. He founded DeepMind as an independent startup in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, reportedly for between $400–650 million. Since then, he’s been at the helm of many of Google’s largest AI research breakthroughs, like AlphaFold — and he’s climbed the ladder from there, now leading Google Gemini, the team formerly known as Google Brain, and even for-profit DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs.
From the start, OpenAI was designed to oppose Google. Musk testified that he was inspired to found it by a conversation with Google’s Larry Page, where Page — in his telling — shrugged at the notion of AI wiping out humanity. It’s not surprising Musk and Altman’s circle would be wary of its AI team. But court documents and testimony reveal just how much Google and Hassabis specifically struck fear into their hearts.
