Demis Hassabis Born in London

Summary

Demis Hassabis was born on July 27, 1976, in London, England. A strong chess player from childhood, he developed an early interest in computing and entered the video-game industry as a teenager. After studying computer science at the University of Cambridge, Hassabis founded the game company Elixir Studios and later completed a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. In 2010 he co-founded DeepMind, an artificial-intelligence research company that Google acquired in 2014. DeepMind became known for systems including AlphaGo, which defeated leading human players at the game of Go, and AlphaFold, which dramatically improved computational prediction of protein structures. Hassabis has continued to lead Google DeepMind and has been involved in research connecting artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and scientific discovery. In 2024 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for protein structure prediction, while David Baker received the other half of the prize for computational protein design.