Google’s AI architect lived rent-free in Elon Musk’s head

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI Policy Close Policy Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Policy Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Follow Follow See All Tech Google’s AI architect lived rent-free in Elon Musk’s head DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis was a constant figure of fear among Musk and other OpenAI higher-ups. by Hayden Field Close Hayden Field Senior AI Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Hayden Field May 5, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC Link Share Gift Photo by Dan Kitwood / Getty Images AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Technical Details

Follow Follow See All AI Policy Close Policy Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Policy Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech Google’s AI architect lived rent-free in Elon Musk’s head DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis was a constant figure of fear among Musk and other OpenAI higher-ups.

by Hayden Field Close Hayden Field Senior AI Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Hayden Field May 5, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC Link Share Gift Part Of Live updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court battle over the future of OpenAI see all updates Hayden Field Close Hayden Field Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Hayden Field is The Verge’s senior AI reporter.

An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets. 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.

Industry Implications

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.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.