Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis, a Member of the American Academy since 2021, is a Nobel laureate and an artificial intelligence researcher. He is Cofounder and CEO of DeepMind and of Isomorphic Labs.

A child chess and programming prodigy, Demis coded the classic game Theme Park at age 17. After graduating from Cambridge University in computer science, he founded pioneering video games company Elixir Studios and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. The journal Science listed his neuroscience research as one of 2007’s top ten breakthroughs. He is a five-time World Games Champion, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2017, he featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE.

DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research company that aims to solve intelligence and advance scientific discovery for all, achieved breakthrough results in many challenging AI domains from Atari to StarCraft II, and has published over 1000 research papers, including more than a dozen in Nature and Science. In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo became the first program to beat a world champion at the complex game of Go. In 2020, its AlphaFold 2 program solved the fifty-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction.