Demis Hassabis is the Founder and CEO of Deepmind, the world's leading AI research company that aims to solve intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity
In 2016, DeepMind developed AlphaGo, the first program to beat a world champion at the complex game of Go. In 2020, its Alphafold program was heralded as a solution to the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction and in 2021, DeepMind launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, which offers the most complete and accurate picture of the human proteome to date.
A chess prodigy, Demis reached master standard aged 13, and went on to program the multi-million selling simulation game Theme Park aged 17. After graduating from Cambridge University in computer science, he founded pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios, and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. Science listed his neuroscience research on imagination as one of 2007’s top ten breakthroughs, and in 2021, AlphaFold2 was selected as the Breakthrough of the Year.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and 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 for services to science and technology.