1976–, Neuroscientist, AI researcher; CEO of Google DeepMind
Demis Hassabis is a British computer scientist, neuroscientist and former chess prodigy and video-game designer who, with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for around USD 500 million and has produced a long string of AI breakthroughs: DQN (Atari, 2013–2015), AlphaGo (2016), AlphaGo Zero (2017), AlphaZero (2017), AlphaFold (2018) and AlphaFold 2 (2020), AlphaStar (2019, StarCraft II), and the Gemini family of large language models (2023–).
Hassabis's PhD (UCL, 2009) was in cognitive neuroscience, specifically the role of the hippocampus in memory and imagination, and DeepMind's research culture has unusually deep ties to neuroscience for an AI lab. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper and David Baker for the AlphaFold work that solved the protein-structure prediction problem.
Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind since the 2023 merger of DeepMind with Google Brain. He has been a notable advocate for AI safety research and an active voice in international AI policy discussions.
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Related people: Shane Legg, David Silver, Mustafa Suleyman
Works cited in this book:
- Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning (2015) (with Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Andrei A. Rusu, Joel Veness, Marc G. Bellemare, Alex Graves, Martin Riedmiller, Andreas K. Fidjeland, Georg Ostrovski, Stig Petersen, Charles Beattie, Amir Sadik, Ioannis Antonoglou, Helen King, Dharshan Kumaran, Daan Wierstra, Shane Legg)
- Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search (2016) (with David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Marc Lanctot, Sander Dieleman, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Ilya Sutskever, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel)
- Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold (2021) (with John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates, Augustin Žídek, Anna Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens Meyer, Simon A. A. Kohl, Andrew J. Ballard, Andrew Cowie, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub Jain, Jonas Adler, Trevor Back, Stig Petersen, David Reiman, Ellen Clancy, Michal Zielinski, Martin Steinegger, Michalina Pacholska, Tamas Berghammer, Sebastian Bodenstein, David Silver, Oriol Vinyals, Andrew W. Senior, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Pushmeet Kohli)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 1: What Is AI?, A Brief History of AI