How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis

How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis

Author: Y Combinator April 29, 2026 Duration: 40:56

Demis Hassabis has had one of the most extraordinary careers in tech. He started as a chess prodigy and video game designer at 17 before getting a PhD in neuroscience and going on to found DeepMind. His lab cracked Go, solved protein structure prediction with AlphaFold, and then gave it away free to every scientist on earth. That work won him the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Today he leads Google DeepMind, pushing toward the same goal he set as a teenager: AGI. On this special live episode of How to Build the Future, he sat down with YC's Garry Tan to talk about what still needs to happen to get us to AGI, his advice for founders on how to stay ahead of the curve and what the next big scientific breakthroughs might be. Chapters:00:00 — Intro00:46 — Demis Hassabis: From Chess Prodigy to DeepMind01:48 — What’s Missing Before We Get To AGI?03:36 — Why Memory Is Still Unsolved06:14 — How AlphaGo Shaped Gemini08:06 — Why Smaller Models Are Getting So Powerful10:46 — The 1000x Engineer12:40 — Continual Learning and the Future of Agents13:32 — Why AI Still Fails at Basic Reasoning15:33 — Are Agents Overhyped or Just Getting Started?18:31 — Can AI Become Truly Creative?20:26 — Open Models, Gemma, and Local AI22:26 — Why Gemini Was Built Multimodal24:08 — What Happens When Inference Gets Cheap?25:24 — From AlphaFold to the Virtual Cells28:24 — AI as the Ultimate Tool for Science30:43 — Advice for Founders33:30 — The AlphaFold Breakthrough Pattern35:20 — Can AI Make Real Scientific Discoveries?37:59 — What to Build Before AGI ArrivesApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs


Behind every successful startup is a story, and the Y Combinator Startup Podcast is where those stories are told in full. This isn't about polished theory; it's the raw, practical conversation happening between founders who have been in the trenches and the Y Combinator partners who advise them. You'll hear directly from people who have navigated the chaotic journey from a flicker of an idea to building a company that scales, discussing not just their victories but, more importantly, the hard lessons and tactical decisions that aren't found in any textbook. Each episode feels like a candid office-hours session, stripping away the hype to focus on the real work of making something people actually want. For anyone curious about the mechanics of building a technology company-the early uncertainties, the pivotal moments, and the relentless focus on execution-this podcast offers an unfiltered look at the craft. Tune in for genuine insights from the frontlines, where the focus remains squarely on the art and science of building things that matter.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Y Combinator Startup Podcast
Podcast Episodes
The State of Startups in 2026 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:28
YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a s…
8 Ways To Improve Your Outbound Sales [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 12:41
The best outbound starts before you automate anything. Founders need to learn who actually has the problem, what gets their attention, and what makes them reply. YC Visiting Partner Christina Gilbert recommends doing at…
Open Models Change The Economics of AI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:15
Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing.Right now, the big…
Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:24
YC Visiting Partner Vivian Shen sits down with Paul Graham at the original YC office in Mountain View to talk about startups, AI, ambition, and what makes great founders.
The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 14:48
Heart Aerospace (YC W19) just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown — a 100-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and $5 of electricity to get it off the ground.In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Gust…
Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:44
Susan Kare joined Apple as an art history PhD who barely knew anything about computers. She went on to design many of the icons, typefaces, and symbols that helped make the original Macintosh feel understandable and huma…
Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 58:17
Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, for long periods of time, without a human babysitting them.At Startup Sc…
Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity" [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:52
Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few months later, OpenClaw had exploded into one of the biggest open source…
Max Hodak: How Startups Build Speed [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:02
Science is building a retinal implant that restores vision to people who have gone blind. One patient has already used it to read a 300-page novel.Building a company like that requires a lot more than getting the technol…