Person

Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis is a British AI researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and was the last author of the 2016 AlphaGo paper. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on predicting protein structures.

Born 1976

AffiliationsGoogle DeepMindUniversity College London

Events per year

10Events 2Organisations 8Works

Overview

Demis Hassabis is a British AI researcher and entrepreneur, born in London in 1976. He is best known as a co-founder and chief executive of DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo and AlphaFold, and as a leading figure in applying AI to scientific problems.^[4]

Education and early career

Hassabis was a chess prodigy who reached master standard at the age of 13. At 17 he co-designed and lead-programmed the video game Theme Park (1994) at Bullfrog Productions. He then studied Computer Science at Queens' College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1997.^[4]

He later earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, which was awarded in 2009. His supervisor was Eleanor Maguire. Cognitive neuroscience studies how the brain processes information, a question that also lies behind much AI research.^[4]

In 1998 he founded the games company Elixir Studios. In 2001 he worked as lead AI programmer on Lionhead's game Black & White, where he was lead AI programmer.^[4]

Major contributions

In 2010 Hassabis co-founded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Google acquired the company in 2014.^[4]

He was the last author of the January 2016 Nature paper on AlphaGo, the program that combined deep neural networks with tree search. The program went on to defeat Lee Sedol 4 to 1 in Seoul in March 2016, and Hassabis later wrote about that victory as DeepMind's CEO.^[3]

In 2020 Hassabis and John Jumper presented AlphaFold2, an AI model that predicts the three-dimensional shape of a protein from its chain of amino acids. It has been used to predict the structure of virtually all known proteins.^[4] Predicting shape from sequence was a problem that had resisted decades of effort by biologists and computer scientists, and AlphaFold2 changed how many researchers approach it.^[4]

Career

After the Google acquisition, Hassabis led DeepMind as its chief executive. He also co-founded Isomorphic Labs, which he leads and which was launched in 2021, applying AI to drug discovery.^[4]

Impact

On 9 October 2024 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced. Half of the prize went to Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind in London for protein structure prediction, and the other half went to David Baker for computational protein design.^[2]

Proteins are central to the chemistry of life, and knowing a protein's shape helps scientists understand what it does and how other molecules might interact with it. The award showed that an AI system trained on scientific data could contribute to this field.^[1]

Hassabis has received other honours. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018, shared the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2023, and was knighted in 2024 for services to AI.^[4]

CapabilitiesScience

TechniquesDeep learning

ApplicationsBiomedicine

Ecosystem & regionEurope

HistoryResearch history

Career timeline

1826
- University College London Worked at
  University College London (UCL) is a public research university in central London. Geoffrey Hinton led its Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and Demis Hassabis, a Gatsby postdoctoral researcher, later co-founded DeepMind.
2010
- Google DeepMind Founded、Worked、Founded 2010–
  A London-headquartered AI research organisation formed in 2023 by merging DeepMind with Google's Brain team, known for AlphaGo, AlphaFold and the Gemini model family.
2016
- Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search Contributed to
  The 2016 Nature paper describing AlphaGo, which combined deep neural networks with tree search. In October 2015 its distributed version beat the European Go champion Fan Hui 5-0, the first time a program defeated a professional player in full-sized Go without handicap.
2017
- Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge Contributed to
  AlphaGo Zero learned Go only by playing against itself, starting from random play, and beat the earlier champion-defeating AlphaGo 100 games to 0 after three days of training. The Nature paper appeared in October 2017.
- A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play Contributed to
  A 2017 arXiv paper, later published in Science, reporting that a single self-play reinforcement learning algorithm, AlphaZero, mastered chess, shogi and Go and beat strong specialised programs in each.
2019
- Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model Contributed to
  MuZero is a DeepMind reinforcement-learning algorithm that learns a model of its environment and plans inside that model, mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi without being given the rules of those games.
2020
- AlphaFold2 Contributed to
  AlphaFold2 is DeepMind's protein structure prediction system, announced in 2020. It reached accuracy competitive with experimental methods in many cases, and work in this area received half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
2021
- Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold Contributed to
  The Nature paper described AlphaFold's methods, system design, and evaluation for protein-structure prediction.
2024
- AlphaFold 3 Contributed to
  AlphaFold 3 is a structure-prediction model from Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, announced on 8 May 2024. It predicts the structures and interactions of proteins, DNA, RNA, ligands and chemical modifications, extending structure prediction beyond proteins alone.[^1]
- Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3 Contributed to
  AlphaFold 3, published in Nature in May 2024, extends structure prediction to biomolecular interactions, reporting greater accuracy than docking tools for protein–ligand binding and than AlphaFold-Multimer v.2.3 for antibody–antigen complexes.

Worked at2

Google DeepMind2010–University College London1826

Founded1

Google DeepMind2010–

20251

Nov 18, 2025
ReleaseGoogle launches Gemini 3
On 18 November 2025 Google announced Gemini 3, starting with Gemini 3 Pro in preview alongside a harder-reasoning Deep Think variant, and reported top scores on public benchmarks and same-day availability in Search.

20243

Dec 11, 2024
ReleaseGoogle introduces Gemini 2.0 for the "agentic era"
On 11 December 2024 Google announced Gemini 2.0, a model line pitched at the "agentic era", with Gemini 2.0 Flash released first to developers and app users.
Oct 9, 2024
MilestoneHassabis and Jumper share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to David Baker for computational protein design and, jointly, to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for AI-based protein structure prediction. The Academy said their work solved a 50-year-old problem.
Feb 15, 2024
ReleaseGoogle announces Gemini 1.5 Pro with a 1-million-token context window
Announced on 15 February 2024, Gemini 1.5 Pro was a mixture-of-experts model offering a 128,000-token context window by default and up to 1 million tokens in private preview — far more material taken in at once.

20232

Dec 6, 2023
ReleaseGoogle DeepMind introduces Gemini
On 6 December 2023 Google announced Gemini 1.0, a model family built to learn text, images, audio and video together from the start. Google called its largest version its most capable model yet.
Apr 20, 2023
MilestoneGoogle Brain and DeepMind merge into Google DeepMind
On 20 April 2023 Google announced that its Brain team and DeepMind would merge into one unit, Google DeepMind, led by Demis Hassabis. Google said the goal was to speed up its AI progress and build capable systems safely and responsibly.

20221

Jun 15, 2022
MilestoneHinton, LeCun, Bengio and Hassabis win the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award
In June 2022, the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research was awarded jointly to Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Demis Hassabis for advancing artificial intelligence and deep learning.

20211

Jul 15, 2021
PaperAlphaFold2 structure-prediction research appears in Nature
In July 2021 the journal Nature published the AlphaFold2 paper from DeepMind. The AI system predicts a protein's three-dimensional shape from its amino-acid sequence, and DeepMind then released its code and a free structure database.

20161

Mar 15, 2016
MilestoneAlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol 4–1 in Seoul
In March 2016 DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, an 18-time world champion Go player, 4–1 in a five-game match in Seoul, a result watched by more than 200 million people worldwide.

20141

Jan 26, 2014
AcquisitionGoogle acquires DeepMind
On 26 January 2014 Google confirmed its acquisition of DeepMind, the London AI company founded in 2010. The deal brought a small deep-learning research group known for Atari-playing systems into Google and set up a unit later merged with Google Brain.

Contributed to8

Notes and sources

Demis Hassabis – Facts – 2024https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/hassabis/facts/
Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/
What we learned in Seoul with AlphaGohttps://blog.google/topics/machine-learning/what-we-learned-in-seoul-with-alphago/
Demis Hassabishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

Cite this page: Demis Hassabis. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/people/demis-hassabis. Updated 2026-11-07