Eyes on the prizePhotograph: Antonio Olmos/Guardian/eyevine

Apr 9th 2026|3 min read

Sir Demis Hassabis has long had an ambitious plan: to develop artificial-intelligence models capable of curing all diseases. His journey towards realising it has been a circuitous one—few career advisers would recommend teaching a machine to play Atari games as a good first step—but his successes are hard to dispute. As the boss of Google DeepMind, a world-leading AI lab, he shared the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2024 for designing AI models that could predict how proteins fold. Nearly two years on, how close to his dearest goal does he think he is?

Baby bottle with measurement markings and a smiling pink nipple on a blue background.

Sir Demis Hassabis wants to automate drug design