DeepMind's CEO does a 'second day' of work at night: 'I come alive at about 1 a.m.'
Jack Taylor/Getty Images for SXSW London
- Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he works in two shifts and sleeps for six hours a night.
- Hassabis packs his office days with back-to-back meetings.
- He said that he's followed this schedule for about a decade.
You're not the only one with a strange sleep routine.
In a video interview with Fortune released on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he sleeps very little and splits his waking hours into two working days.
"I do try and get six, but I have unusual sleeping habits," he said, about his number of hours of sleep. "I sort of manage during the day."
He said that any less sleep than that would be bad for the brain.
Hassabis cofounded DeepMind in 2010, which Google acquired in 2014. It merged with Google Brain in 2023 to form Google DeepMind, the lab behind tools such as Gemini and Nano Banana. The CEO and a DeepMind coworker, John Jumper, were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work on protein structure prediction.
Hassabis said that he tries to pack his day in the office with as many meetings as possible with "almost no time" in between. He then gets home, spends time with family, and has dinner.
"Then I sort of start a second day of work about 10 p.m. and go to 4 a.m., where I do my thinking and kind of more creative work and research work," he said.
The CEO added that he's followed this schedule for about a decade. Hassabis earlier spoke about his sleep routine in a 2017 interview with BBC Radio.
"I can't imagine being creative at four in the morning. But, I come alive at about 1 a.m.," he told Fortune's Alyson Shontell.
Hassabis' routine matches what other tech founders have shared about their sleep schedules, especially during the early stages of founding or growing their businesses.
Elon Musk has said that he functions best with about six hours of sleep — any less affects his performance. In a 2018 interview with Bloomberg, Musk said that he slept on the floor of a Tesla factory during some production periods.
Marc Benioff, meanwhile, said in a 2023 interview that he averages about eight hours of sleep.