AlphaGo Co-Creator Launches Metis to Prove LLMs Can't Reason
By Daniel Rao · London, October 20, 2026 One of the men who taught a machine to humiliate a world champion at Go has just told the most powerful industry on earth that it is building on sand. Thore Graepel — co-creator of AlphaGo, until this summer a research lead at Google DeepMind — launched Metis Reasoning in London today with a thesis that reads like a punch in the mouth: large language models don’t actually reason, and no amount of scaling will ever make them. If he’s right, the trillion-dollar bet on ever-bigger models is aimed at entirely the wrong target. King’s Cross, London — the AI ecosystem Metis Reasoning is calling home as it tries to build a different kind of artificial intelligence. Photo: Bert Seghers / Wikimedia Commons (CC0) Graepel left DeepMind this summer and has assembled a 12-strong team of researchers, mathematicians, robotics specialists and entrepreneurs to pursue what Tech.eu describes as a “compute-eff...