Nobel laureate and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis envisions a future where AI revolutionizes healthcare by drastically accelerating drug development—from years to weeks—and potentially curing all diseases within a decade.
In a CBS interview, Hassabis discussed AI’s exponential progress, its power to unlock radical abundance, and the ethical guardrails needed to ensure these systems benefit humanity.
“It takes, on average, ten years and billions of dollars to develop just one drug,” Hassabis explained. “We could maybe reduce that down to months, or even weeks.”
This is the same scientist whose AI model cracked the code of protein structures — the essential building blocks of life — mapping over 200 million structures in a single year.
Before DeepMind's intervention, only 1% of those structures had been deciphered, each taking years to decode.
That same AI prowess is now being aimed at drug development. According to Hassabis, such exponential leaps in research speed could “revolutionize human health.”
While current AI models are still limited by a lack of true curiosity and intuition, Hassabis sees a not-too-distant future where machines won’t just solve scientific problems — they’ll identify them first.
“In the next five to ten years,” he said, “we’ll have systems that are capable of coming up with new hypotheses in science on their own.”