Demis Hassabis is a computer scientist, neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and the founder of DeepMind, the pioneering neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence company acquired by Google in January 2014.
Hassabis began his career in artificial intelligence in the games industry. A chess and programming prodigy, he co-designed and programmed the multi-million-selling construction and management simulation game Theme Park at the age of 17, after completing his A-levels at 16. After graduating from the University of Cambridge with a Double First in Computer Science, Hassabis founded the award-winning video game company Elixir Studios, producing titles for global publishers including Vivendi Universal. Following more than a decade leading successful technology startups, he returned to academia, earning a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, followed by postdoctoral research at MIT and Harvard.
In 2010, Hassabis founded DeepMind in London. The company was acquired by Google in 2014 and now operates as part of Alphabet. Under his leadership, DeepMind has grown to more than 2,000 research scientists and engineers and has delivered landmark breakthroughs across numerous AI domains, including Atari games and StarCraft II. In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat the world champion in the complex game of Go through self-play. In 2020, this success was followed by AlphaFold2, which solved the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction by accurately predicting protein 3D structures, with profound implications for biology, disease research, and drug discovery.
Hassabis is a five-time World Games Champion and a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. His research on the relationship between memory and imagination was named one of Science magazine’s top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2007. He was included in TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2017, appointed CBE in 2018 for services to science and technology, and awarded the Dan David Prize Future Award in 2020 for his work in AI. In 2024, Hassabis received a knighthood for services to artificial intelligence and was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold2.