Proponents of online hustle culture talk often talk about getting up as early as possible, but a recent Nobel Prize winner — and one of the most consequential CEOs of the age — does things a little differently.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis goes to sleep when many people are just about getting up — at 4 in the morning. “I think I probably have some quite unusual habits,” he had said on a podcast in 2017. “I generally sleep at about 4 in the morning. I’ll get in to work around 10 a.m., do a full day’s work in the office, come back for dinner, spend a bit of time with the family,” he says.
But while most people might look to end their day after at this point, Hassabis is just getting started. He says his “second day” starts at 10 in the night. “I start a second day’s work at 10 p.m., 11 p.m., and go on to the small hours of the morning. Usually, that’s the time when I do my research. So I’ll be reading about the latest academic papers. I like doing all of my kind of creative thinking in the small hours of the morning. I have a lot of habits like that that I’ve learnt, maximised the way that I think,” he says.
Hassabis’s unconventional methods seem to have worked for him. He had sold DeepMind, an AI company he’d founded, to Google for an estimated $500 million in 2014. After Google integrated its own AI efforts with DeepMind a few years ago, Hassabis became the CEO of Google DeepMind. Google DeepMind is behind Google’s state-of-the-art LLM, Gemini, and has many other successful launches to its credit, including AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve, beating the best human player at Go, and winning a gold medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad. Hassabis himself was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to Alpha Fold. And while that seems like a lot to achieve — Hassabis is just 48 — squeezing out two working days out of a single one by working till late in the night seems to have helped him both pursue academia at the highest levels and run a multi-billion dollar company at once.