Demis Hassabis stands halfway up a spiral staircase, a golden helix rising through the stairwell behind him. Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs. The DNA sculpture, spanning three floors, is the centerpiece of DeepMind’s recently opened London headquarters. It’s an artistic representation of the code embedded in the nucleus of nearly every cell in the human body. “Although we work on making machines smart, we wanted to keep humanity at the center of what we’re doing here,” Hassabis tells TIME. He and his colleagues are working toward a grand ambition: creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, by building machines that can think, learn, and be set to solve humanity’s toughest problems. Today’s AI is narrow, brittle, and often not very intelligent at all. But AGI, Hassabis believes, will be an “epoch-defining” technology—like the harnessing of electricity—that will change the very fabric of human life. But with AI’s promise also comes peril. Tap the link in our bio to read more about Hassabis's goals and cautions for the future of AI. Photograph by James Day (@jamesdayphoto) for TIME