Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis is an artificial intelligence researcher born in London, England, in 1976. He was a chess prodigy as a child, and at 17 he coded Theme Park, a computer game that sold millions of copies. After graduating from the University of Cambridge with a Double First (top honours) in computer science, he founded the games company Elixir Studios. He later returned to university and in 2009 earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience (the study of how the brain remembers and thinks) from University College London (UCL). During his PhD he studied how the brain recalls past experiences and imagines the future.

In 2010 he co-founded the AI company DeepMind in London with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, and Google bought the company in 2014. DeepMind's Go-playing AI, AlphaGo, beat Lee Sedol 4–1 in Seoul in March 2016. In 2020 he and John Jumper presented AlphaFold2, an AI that predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Proteins are the substances that drive the chemical reactions at the basis of life, and AlphaFold2 is widely used in areas such as research into new medicines. For this work the two shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David Baker. In April 2023 he became CEO of Google DeepMind, formed by combining DeepMind with Google's Brain team.

In 2021 he founded Isomorphic Labs, a company that uses AI to design medicines, and became its CEO. The company announced in May 2026 that it had raised $2.1 billion in investment (company-reported). On 5 August 2026 he handed day-to-day running of Google DeepMind to Koray Kavukcuoglu and became Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, Google's parent company. The aim was to focus more on the big picture of artificial general intelligence (AGI: AI that can do a wide range of tasks as well as people), on science and on his work at Isomorphic Labs. Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted that Hassabis has described the present as 'the foothills of the singularity' (a turning point at which technology starts advancing explosively). He was also knighted in 2024 for services to AI. As of October 2026 he is Chair of Google DeepMind, Chief Scientist of Alphabet and CEO of Isomorphic Labs.