Demis Hassabis: We are entering a golden age of discovery

The pessimists want you to believe we’re running out of everything. They’re wrong. We’re on the verge of solving problems that have plagued humanity since the beginning—if we choose to build instead of cower.

Personalized medicine and personalized everything in our future. We will do more. If you think it will be the same with less people then you will despair. If you know, like founders know, there is more to do, then you get building.

The Golden Era Is 10 Years Away (If We Don’t Screw It Up)

Demis Hassabis—Nobel Prize winner, chess master, the guy who actually solved protein folding with AlphaFold—sat down with Fortune and laid out a roadmap that should make every builder’s heart race. Within 10-15 years, we enter a “golden era of discovery.” A new renaissance. Medicine won’t look like it does today—personalized treatment becomes reality, not a PowerPoint slide at a pharma conference.

And here’s where it gets wild: Hassabis sees AI solving the energy crisis—fusion, solar, optimal batteries—leading to what he calls “radical abundance.” The end state? Humanity travels the stars and explores the galaxy. This isn’t sci-fi from some random futurist. This is the guy who already delivered on seemingly impossible promises. When he says we’re close, you listen.

Personalized Everything: The Death of Scarcity Medicine

The constraint was never biology. It was computing power and data. AI drug discovery is already cutting timelines from 4.5 years to 9-18 months. That’s not marginal improvement—that’s a category shift in what’s possible.

Healthcare’s administrative bloat? Vaporized by AI agents that can navigate insurance bureaucracy while you sleep. Vertical AI is so goddamn powerful these days. Remember Google had a team that specialized in exactly this kind of phone call for restaurants and personal assistant tasks? Now imagine it working to make healthcare more accessible and to cut through massive administrative waste.

The pessimist view says we get the same with less people, leading to despair. The builder view says there’s MORE to do—more diseases to cure, more efficiency to extract, more lives to extend. Human wants and needs are infinite. Every solved problem reveals ten more problems worth solving.

Intelligence × Energy = Infinite Leverage

Marc Andreessen nailed it in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto: put intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and you can drive both to infinity. AI is “our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think.”

Technology creators capture just 2% of the value they create. The other 98% flows to everyone else. That’s not exploitation—that’s the most philanthropic engine ever invented.

Nuclear fission was always the silver bullet for unlimited zero-emissions energy. Nixon called for 1,000 nuclear plants by 2000 in his Project Independence. We didn’t build them. The same bad ideas that killed civilian nuclear power will try to kill fusion. We should not let them.

Fusion is coming. Once energy is “too cheap to meter,” physical goods become as cheap as pencils. We need energy now. Reindustrialize America starts with building energy and streamlining regulatory and permitting delays.

The Only Way to Create Suffering Is to Outlaw Progress

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in an age of superabundance, the only way to create suffering at scale is to outlaw progress.

Andreessen names the enemies: stagnation, deceleration, de-growth, the Precautionary Principle, vetocracy. These aren’t neutral positions. They’re active choices to maintain engineered scarcity.

If you have regulatory capture on AI, the highest bidder wins the smartest AI—the world becomes enslaved. Open source AI = freedom. Imagine patients trying to get their claims processed by an adversarial United Healthcare Group AI, with no comparable alternative AI for the patient. That’s the captured future. The decentralized future—where everyone gets access to superhuman reasoning—that’s freedom.

Founders Know: There’s More to Build

Two worldviews are competing for your soul. One says “same with less people” and leads to despair. The other says “more to do” and leads to building.

Founders understand intuitively what economists formalize: human wants and needs are infinite. Milton Friedman saw it. The techno-optimists see it. Every technology that saves an hour creates demand for new experiences to fill that hour.

Y Combinator exists to accelerate technological progress by bringing together smart builders and giving them capital, people networks, and the megaphone to build their dreams. That mission only makes sense if you believe there’s always more to build.

The pessimists will always have reasons why it can’t work. Why this particular technology is different. Why this particular moment requires caution. Why we should slow down “just until we figure things out.”

Build anyway.

Don’t boil the ocean? That’s advice for people who’ve given up. If the problem is important enough, boil it three times and version-control the planet. We have the intelligence. We’re building the energy. The only question left is whether YOU will build—or stand with the vetocrats who’ve never created anything.

Founders know the answer. Get building.