Demis Hassabis

An artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and neuroscientist, Demis Hassabis is the CEO and founder of DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research company that aims to solve intelligence and advance scientific discovery for all.

Founded in 2010, DeepMind 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 developed AlphaGo, the first program to beat a world champion at the complex game of Go, and in 2020, its AlphaFold program was heralded as a solution to the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction. A child chess and programming prodigy, Demis coded the classic 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. 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 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.