Demis Hassabis should be knighted

Oh, he's already knighted? Unfortunately so was J-mmy Saville so the award means nothing + the crown is a compromised entity (Babylon).

Instead, I am glad to present with a much more meaningful British achievement: the Gold Star Award (IYKYK).

We're gonna go beyond discussing DeepMind's technical achievements with him at the helm but if you want an overview watch this: The Thinking Game.

My main focus is: Demis fought to keep DeepMind in London. The direct and indirect consequences of this choice are enormous.

DeepMind Technologies Limited (the UK legal entity) spent £1.01 billion on staff in 2024. I'd estimate that is the wage bill for roughly 2,000+ people, all based in the UK.

From that payroll, HMRC collects an estimated £353 million per year in income tax, National Insurance and corporation tax - BEFORE RSUs. Then when Google stock vests for DeepMind employees, each vesting event triggers PAYE income tax at marginal rates of 45%. For a company handing out £100k+ equity grants per employee, this is substantial additional tax revenue. Every one of those jobs exists in the UK because Demis refused to let DeepMind become a US company.

Beyond payroll other benefits of Demain:
(Demis + Remain get it? Like Brexit - ight I'll head out)

Job-creation by proxy of competition, here are a few examples of the competition in the dense space that is Coal Drops Yard, Kings Cross, London:

• Wayve - down the road from Deepmind. Directly competing with them for UK-based talent, particularly in the ML/AI/robotics/computer vision space. Good for the market.
  
• Meta - across the park from them. Again competing against them for AI/ML/CV/SWE/Product.
• XTX Markets — biggest tax payer in the UK. Funnily enough they operate in the same building as one of the DeepMind offices. Is that the most productive building in the entirety of the UK? Nominate one other. Maybe Lebo Grill on Old Kent Road with their multi-paxos system of grilling chicken (deep research post coming soon).
  

Serious prevention of brain drain to the US:

• Inspired a generation of AI researchers, engineers, safety, GTM, robotics etc to stay in the UK
• Kept Imperial, UCL, Oxford pipelines feeding into UK industry rather than straight to US offers (or worse... into finance)
• Cultivating a culture of cutting-edge research and development

Policy influence:

• DeepMind's presence made London a credible seat at the table for AI governance conversations (UK AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, 2023). Hard to imagine that happening without a world-class lab anchored there
• "London is a serious AI city" is mostly a DeepMind story. Downstream effects on investment, startups, talent relocation decisions

An inspiration to his peers:

• David Silver appears to be keeping his new $1bn backed startup Ineffable Intelligence in the UK according to Companies House registration (sleuthing)

Demis and John Jumper (not a basketball player) won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold2 which predicted the structure of virtually every known protein. DeepMind then spunout a new company, Isomorphic Labs, which raised $600 million in 2025 and has active drug discovery partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis - all UK-incorporated. More UK job creation.

Remember, he didn't have to do this. Some of his closest peers who founded DeepMind alongside him left the UK immediately - Mustafa Suleyman quit DeepMind raised $1.5bn to found Inflection AI (all jobs in California, US), left for Microsoft, instantly moved to the US.

I know what you're thinking. I can see the words pinging off the walls of your skull.

But what about the pending economic white collar doom we're all in for thanks to his insistence on AGI?

What if he isn't thinking about the potential effects of this because he's so lasered in on his goal?

What if he has bad intentions?

What if the human intelligence displacement train has no brakes?

These are all legit concerns and have been voiced intensely over the past few months.

Strangely enough both Demis and Amodei mention an internal slowdown of hiring for interns/junior roles even intermediates (wait that's me?) and adapting the corporate hiring strategy to account for needing less engineers.

It seems as though I'm more optimistic than they are because if human creativity was unparalleled and AI/AGI was a complement to that wouldn't you want to stockpile talent to leverage the latter? Idk maybe I'm cooked.

See when AlphaFold solved the protein folding problem - a huge problem that was being worked on by biologists, researchers, doctors etc. for 50 YEARS - did that kill protein research? Was every biologist out of a job immediately? Did PhDs drop out? I mean AlphaFold literally made CASP (the 30 year competition) redundant yet they funded it in 2025 when it was about to shut due to Trump's budget cuts.

Instead protein research exploded as AlphaFold made the work cheaper, fast and more accessible:

• 3 million+ researchers in 190+ countries using it
• 40% increase in novel experimental protein structure submissions by researchers using AlphaFold2
• 45,000+ papers citing it, 200,000+ incorporating the methodology
• 30% of AlphaFold research focuses on disease understanding
• Applications: heart disease (apoB100 structure), Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, diabetes, rare genetic diseases (AlphaMissense)
• 8 million+ structures predicted via the server
• SAVING THE BEES: Breeding healthier and stronger honeybees

It would be interesting to know more from someone closer to the source on protein folder and biology to see how AlphaFold has effected your work (email me).

One thing I do know is that Demis and the DeepMind team made the paper + algorithm + source code + database public immediately.

I will admit most AI/AGI safety research is concentrated on 'stronger mitigations against bad actors misusing increasingly powerful systems' instead of the downstream effects and influence of AGI itsef on the world. Anthropic do seem to be the only major AI lab that puts out research specifically studying the effects of AI on the real world to the extent where they have an entire research team dedicated to 'Societal Impacts' and put out the best research/reporting in this field.

The biggest concern with AGI is the speed and distribution. Historically technology transitions were slow enough such that retraining could keep up. However if AGI development + distribution is faster than humans can retrain then it may be over for us.

My worry is as this exponential - AGI closing the loop - keeps compounding it will overwhelm our ability to adapt.

That was Dario Amodei CEO of Anthropic at the "The Day After AGI" panel in Davos 2026.

Demis, at the same panel:

Some jobs get disrupted, but then new, more valuable, usually more interesting jobs get created.

The next big question is making sure that that's fairly shared and everyone in society benefits from that.

I'm constantly surprised, even when I meet economists at places like this, that there aren't more professional economists and professors thinking about what happens.

it may be a good thing that it's not as fast — on chip shortages slowing AGI deployment

He has been super consistent from an ethical standpoint solely dedicated to the mission of AGI for good — even having to fight Google to ensure this. Formed an ethics board immediately after Google's acquisition in 2014, formed AGI safety boards and the Frontier Safety Framework.

He also discussed how not enough focus is on things like AlphaFold, curing diseases, creating energy sources which adds to the angst and popular backlash against AI.

Wow this reads like a PR post for Demis and DeepMind doesn't it? Ffs. Anyway I'm off to play tennis.

Agree, disagree, love, hate - I'd like to hear it! Shout me -> ossamachaib.cs@gmail.com.