Sir Demis Hassabis (b. 1976) is a British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist, and entrepreneur who co-founded the AI laboratory DeepMind and serves as its chief executive. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of AlphaFold, a system that predicts the three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences.[2]
Early life and education
Demis Hassabis was born on 27 July 1976 in London.[1] A chess prodigy who reached master standard as a teenager, he later designed and programmed video games, contributing to the strategy simulation title Theme Park in the early 1990s. He read Computer Science at Queens' College, University of Cambridge, and went on to earn a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, where his research examined the relationship between memory and imagination.[1]
Games and research career
Before founding DeepMind, Hassabis worked in the video game industry, including at Lionhead Studios, and established his own studio, Elixir Studios. His scientific work in neuroscience explored the brain's hippocampus and its role in episodic memory, findings that later informed his approach to building general-purpose learning systems.[1]
DeepMind and AlphaGo
In 2010 Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, a company dedicated to building artificial general intelligence. Google acquired the laboratory in 2014. Under his leadership DeepMind developed AlphaGo, a program that in 2016 defeated a leading professional player of the board game Go, a result widely regarded as a landmark for machine learning.[3]
AlphaFold and the Nobel Prize
DeepMind's AlphaFold system addressed a long-standing problem in biology by accurately predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins. For this work Hassabis was awarded a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with John Jumper and David Baker.[2] The predicted structures have been made freely available to researchers and applied across the life sciences.
Recognition
Hassabis has received numerous honours, including the Princess of Asturias Award, the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, and the Canada Gairdner International Award. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and later received a knighthood, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society.[4]
