Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, does his most important work at an hour when almost everyone he manages is asleep, according to what he told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell in February 2026. By day, he sits in meetings stacked back to back with “almost no time, no break between,” then goes home, spends time with his family and has dinner. Around 10 p.m., he starts again; the second shift runs until 4 a.m., and it is when he does his thinking, his research and his most creative work. “I come alive at about 1 a.m.,” he said. He has kept this schedule for about a decade. In that time, the lab he co-founded has built AlphaGo and AlphaFold, he has shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and been knighted, and he has started a second company, Isomorphic Labs, which uses AI to search for new medicines. He now oversees Google’s AI work, including Gemini. The split day is the clearest expression of how Hassabis has always operated: guard the hours for deep thought, and compress everything else.