Demis Hassabis

Hassabis showed a gift for games and programming from childhood. The Royal Society describes Hassabis as a child chess prodigy and a five-time World Games Champion, and at age 17 Hassabis coded the classic AI simulation game Theme Park.13

Hassabis matriculated at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1994 to read computer science, and graduated with a double first. Hassabis also founded the videogame company Elixir Studios.931

At University College London, Hassabis went on to complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, researching the processes behind memory and imagination. The journal Science listed that research on imagination and memory among its top ten breakthroughs of 2007.31

In 2010 Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company that took an interdisciplinary approach to building general AI systems. Google acquired DeepMind in January 2014.11910

DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first program to beat a world champion at Go. In October 2015 it won the first ever match between an AI system and a Go professional, 5-0 against Fan Hui, and in March 2016 it defeated Lee Sedol 4-1 in Seoul, South Korea. Its creative Move 37 in game two upended centuries of traditional Go thinking and showed that AI systems can learn to solve challenging problems in highly complex domains.121

Hassabis led the AlphaFold project from its inception in 2016. In November 2020 AlphaFold 2 won the CASP14 competition, whose organisers recognized it as a solution to the 50-year-old protein folding problem. In July 2021 DeepMind and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database with free, open access, and by July 2022 it had expanded to over 200 million structures, covering nearly every catalogued protein known to science.313

To carry that work into medicine, Hassabis founded Isomorphic Labs in 2021 as a new Alphabet company with a mission to reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach. In May 2024 Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs introduced AlphaFold 3, which predicts the structure and interactions of all of life's molecules.1413

In October 2024 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly to Hassabis and John Jumper "for protein structure prediction," noting that AlphaFold2 has been used to predict the structure of virtually all the proteins researchers have identified.2

In April 2023 Google brought together the Brain team and DeepMind as Google DeepMind, led by Hassabis as CEO, with a mission to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity. That December, Hassabis introduced Gemini on behalf of the Gemini team, the first models of a new generation of Google AI.161117

In March 2026 Hassabis announced Platform 37, Google's new London building at King's Cross, named in honor of AlphaGo's famous Move 37 and home to The AI Exchange, a free public space for learning about AI.18

In 2026 Hassabis stepped into a new strategic role as Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, handing over day-to-day operational responsibilities at Google DeepMind to focus on the big picture and on actively shaping the future of AGI, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs, a role Hassabis plans to lean into. Announcing the change, Sundar Pichai wrote, "I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it."19

Hassabis was knighted in 2024 for services to artificial intelligence, and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Academy of Engineering.81