Demis Hassabis
CEO, DeepMind
Biography
Sir Demis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions to protein structure prediction.
Career Timeline
He first got interested in technology after buying his first computer in 1984, a ZX Spectrum 48K, funded from chess winnings.
He began by playtesting on Syndicate and then at 17 co-designing and lead-programming on the 1994 game Theme Park, with the game's designer Peter Molyneux.
He represented the University of Cambridge in the Oxford–Cambridge varsity chess matches of 1995, 1996 and 1997, winning a half blue.
Hassabis left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he completed the Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997 with a double first.
Hassabis left Lionhead in 1998 to found Elixir Studios, a London-based independent games developer, signing publishing deals with Eidos Interactive, Vivendi Universal and Microsoft.
At Lionhead, Hassabis worked as lead AI programmer on the 2001 god game Black & White.
In April 2005 the intellectual property and technology rights were sold to various publishers and the studio was closed.
Following Elixir Studios, Hassabis returned to academia to obtain his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in 2009 supervised by Eleanor Maguire.
Key Achievements
- Co-founded DeepMind, solving grand challenges in AI
- Led the team that created AlphaGo to defeat human Go champions
- Developed AlphaFold, revolutionizing protein folding prediction in biology
Notable Quotes
"Step one, solve intelligence; step two, use it to solve everything else."
"https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/google/unlocking-lifes-building-blocks-demis-hassabis/3867/"
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HzgcbRXUK8"