Demis Hassabis facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Demis Hassabis
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Hassabis in 2025
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| Born | 27 July 1976 London, England
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| Thesis | Neural processes underpinning episodic memory (2009) |
| Doctoral advisor | Eleanor Maguire |
| Chess career | |
| Country | England |
| Title | Candidate Master |
| Years active | 1988–2019 |
| FIDE rating | 2220 (March 2019) |
| Peak rating | 2300 (January 1990) |
Sir Demis Hassabis, born on July 27, 1976, is a British expert in artificial intelligence (AI) and a business leader. He is the head and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. He also advises the UK Government on AI. In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together. They received this award for their AI research that helps predict protein shapes.
Hassabis is a Fellow of the Royal Society, which is a very respected group of scientists. He has won many important awards for his research. These include the Breakthrough Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award, and the Lasker Award. In 2017, he was given the title of CBE. He was also listed in the Time 100, a list of the most influential people. In 2024, he was knighted for his work in AI. He was again featured in the Time 100 in 2025, even appearing on one of its covers.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Demis Hassabis was born to Costas and Angela Hassabis. His father is Greek Cypriot, and his mother is from Singapore. Demis grew up in North London. When he was younger, he was a video game AI programmer and designer. He was also a very skilled board games player.
A Chess Prodigy
Hassabis was a child prodigy in chess, starting at age four. By age 13, he reached a master level with an Elo rating of 2300. This was the second-highest rating in the world for his age at that time. He led many of the England junior chess teams. He played for the University of Cambridge in important chess matches in 1995, 1996, and 1997.
Schooling and Early Programming
Between 1988 and 1990, Hassabis attended Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet. This was a boys' grammar school in North London. After that, his parents taught him at home. During this time, he bought his first computer, a ZX Spectrum 48K. He paid for it with his chess winnings. He taught himself how to program from books. He wrote his first AI program on a Commodore Amiga. It was based on the reversi board game. He then studied at Christ's College, Finchley. He finished his A-level exams two years early, at age 16.
Starting in Video Games
Cambridge University asked Hassabis to take a gap year because he was so young. He began his computer games career at Bullfrog Productions. He won a competition to get a job there. He first designed levels for the game Syndicate. At 17, he helped design and was the main programmer for Theme Park (1994). He worked with the game's designer, Peter Molyneux. Theme Park was a simulation video game that sold millions of copies. It inspired many other simulation games. He earned enough money during his gap year to pay for his university studies.
University Studies
Hassabis left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College, Cambridge. He studied Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997. He earned a double first, which means he achieved top grades.
Career and Research in AI
Working at Lionhead Studios
After graduating from Cambridge, Hassabis worked at Lionhead Studios. This company was founded by Peter Molyneux, whom Hassabis had worked with before. At Lionhead, Hassabis was the lead AI programmer for the 2001 game Black & White. This was a "god game" where players control a powerful being.
Founding Elixir Studios
In 1998, Hassabis left Lionhead to start his own company, Elixir Studios. This was an independent game developer in London. They made deals with big publishers like Eidos Interactive and Microsoft. Besides managing the company, Hassabis was the executive designer for Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius. Both games were nominated for BAFTA awards for their music.
Republic: The Revolution was a very ambitious political simulation game. It was delayed because it tried to simulate an entire fictional country. The final game was smaller than planned and got mixed reviews. Evil Genius, a fun game about being a Bond villain, did much better. In 2005, the company's rights were sold, and the studio closed.
Studying the Human Brain
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After Elixir Studios, Hassabis went back to school. He earned his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in 2009. His supervisor was Eleanor Maguire. He wanted to learn from the human brain to create new AI programs.
He continued his research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. In 2009, he received a fellowship to work at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. He worked with Peter Dayan.
He studied imagination, memory, and amnesia. He wrote several important papers published in top science journals. His first paper showed that people with damage to their hippocampus (which causes amnesia) also struggled to imagine new experiences. This linked imagination to how we remember things. Based on this, Hassabis suggested that our memory system uses "scene construction." This means creating a complex scene in our minds, which helps us remember and imagine. This idea was widely covered and listed as a top scientific breakthrough in 2007. He later expanded this idea, suggesting the mind has a "simulation engine" to imagine events for better planning.
Founding DeepMind
Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind. This AI company started in London in 2010. He founded it with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Hassabis met Legg when they were both researchers. He and Suleyman were friends through family. Hassabis also brought in his university friend and former colleague, David Silver.
DeepMind's goal is to "solve intelligence." Then, they want to use that intelligence to "solve everything else." They aim to combine ideas from brain science with new developments in machine learning. This will create powerful learning programs that can lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company has focused on teaching AI to master games. In 2013, they announced a big step forward. They trained an AI called Deep Q-Network (DQN) to play Atari games better than humans. It learned just by looking at the game screen.
Many famous tech leaders invested in DeepMind early on. In 2014, Google bought DeepMind for £400 million. Most of the company stayed independent in London. However, DeepMind Health later became part of Google Health.
Since Google bought DeepMind, the company has made many big achievements. One of the most famous is AlphaGo. This program beat world champion Lee Sedol at the complex game of Go. Go was considered a huge challenge for AI. AlphaGo first beat European champion Fan Hui 5–0 in 2015. Then, it beat former world champion Lee Sedol 4–1 in 2016. In 2017, it beat the world's top-ranked player Ke Jie 3–0.
Other DeepMind achievements include creating a neural Turing machine. They also reduced the energy used by Google's data centers by 40%. They have also worked on AI safety research. DeepMind partnered with the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. They also worked with Moorfields Eye Hospital to improve medical services. This partnership helps identify eye conditions early.
DeepMind has also made technical progress in machine learning. They have published many award-winning papers. They have made big steps in deep learning and reinforcement learning. They also started the field of deep reinforcement learning, which combines these two methods. Hassabis believes that artificial intelligence will be "one of the most beneficial technologies of mankind ever." However, he also says there are important ethical issues to consider.
Hassabis has warned about the dangers of AI if it is used wrongly. He strongly supports more research into AI safety. In 2023, he signed a statement saying that preventing the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. This is as important as dealing with pandemics or nuclear war. However, he thinks stopping AI progress worldwide would be very hard. He also believes the benefits (like for health and climate change) make it worth continuing. He said there is an urgent need for tests to measure how capable and controllable new AI models are.
AlphaFold: Predicting Protein Shapes
In 2016, DeepMind used its AI for protein structure prediction. This was a major scientific challenge for 50 years. The goal was to predict a protein's 3D shape from its 1D amino acid sequence. This is important in biology because proteins are vital for life. Almost every biological function depends on them. A protein's function is linked to its shape. Knowing a protein's shape can help a lot in finding new medicines and understanding diseases.
In December 2018, DeepMind's tool, AlphaFold, won the 13th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. It successfully predicted the most accurate shapes for 25 out of 43 proteins. Hassabis told The Guardian that this was a "lighthouse project." It was their first big investment in a very important real-world scientific problem.
In November 2020, DeepMind announced even better results in the CASP14 competition with AlphaFold 2. This new version achieved a very high score (87.0) in predicting protein shapes. This was much better than previous results. Its error was less than the width of an atom. This made it as good as experimental methods. The CASP organizers said the problem was basically solved. Over the next year, DeepMind used AlphaFold2 to predict the shapes of all 200 million known proteins. They made the system and these shapes freely available to everyone. This was done through the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database.
Personal Life
Demis Hassabis is married to Dr. Teresa Niccoli, who is a molecular biologist from Italy. They have two sons. He lives in North London with his family. He is also a lifelong fan of Liverpool FC, a football team. Hassabis is the main subject of a documentary called The Thinking Game. It premiered in 2024. This film was made by the same person who directed the award-winning documentary AlphaGo (2016).
Awards and Honors
Demis Hassabis has received many awards for his work in science and technology.
- 2025 – Named one of the 50 most influential people in UK technology by Computer Weekly.
- 2025 – Honored by Gold House A100.
- 2025 – Listed in Time 100: The 100 Most Influential People.
- 2025 – Included in the STAT Status List.
- 2025 – Inducted into the Ukie Hall of Fame.
- 2024 – Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- 2024 – Recognized by Clarivate Citation Laureates.
- 2024 – Received the Keio Medical Science Prize.
- 2024 – Named The AI Citizen of the Year.
- 2024 – Included in the Time 100 AI list.
- 2024 – Received Science Museum Group Fellowship Awards.
- 2024 – Awarded an honorary degree from the University of Oxford.
- 2024 – Knighted for his "services to artificial intelligence."
- 2023 – Received the BCS Lovelace Medal.
- 2023 – Gave the UCL Prize Lecture in Life and Medical Sciences.
- 2023 – Won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.
- 2023 – Awarded an honorary degree from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
- 2023 – Became a Member of the Academia Europaea.
- 2023 – Received the Canada Gairdner International Award.
- 2023 – Became an Ordinary Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
- 2023 – Won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold.
- 2022 – Received the VinFuture Prize for outstanding achievements in new fields.
- 2022 – Won the Global Swiss AI Award.
- 2022 – Received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine.
- 2022 – Won the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research.
- 2022 – Received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences.
- 2022 – Became an Advisor to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency.
- 2021 – Received the IRI Medal.
- 2021 – Became an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- 2020 – Received the Pius XI Medal from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
- 2020 – Listed among the 50 most influential people in Britain by British GQ magazine.
- 2020 – Won the Dan David Prize – Future Award.
- 2019 – Named one of the 50 most influential people in UK technology by Computer Weekly.
- 2018 – Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).
- 2018 – Became an Adviser to the UK's Government Office for Artificial Intelligence.
- 2018 – Received an honorary doctorate from Imperial College London.
- 2017 – Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for "services to Science and Technology."
- 2017 – Listed in Time 100: The 100 Most Influential People.
- 2017 – Won The Asian Awards: Outstanding Achievement in Science and Technology.
- 2017 – Elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).
- 2017 – Received the American Academy of Achievement: Golden Plate Award.
- 2016 – Named an Honorary Fellow of University College London.
- 2016 – Joined the Francis Crick Institute scientific advisory board.
- 2016 – Listed among influential Londoners by the London Evening Standard.
- 2016 – Received the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal.
- 2016 – Won the WIRED Leadership in Innovation award.
- 2016 – Included in Nature's 10: the 10 most influential scientists of the year.
- 2016 – Named Financial Times Digital Entrepreneur of the Year.
- 2016 – Listed in Wired Global 100.
- 2015 – Listed among the Financial Times' top 50 Entrepreneurs in Europe.
- 2015 – Became a Fellow Benefactor of Queens' College, Cambridge.
- 2014 – Named the third most influential Londoner by the London Evening Standard.
- 2014 – Received the Mullard Award of the Royal Society.
- 2013 – Listed on WIRED's 'Smart 50'.
- 2009 – Became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
Research Recognition
Hassabis's research has been listed in the Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of the Year by the journal Science four times:
- 2021 Breakthrough of the Year (Winner) – for AlphaFold v2.
- 2020 Breakthrough of the Year (Top 10) – for AlphaFold v1.
- 2016 Breakthrough of the Year (Top 10) – for AlphaGo.
- 2007 Breakthrough of the Year (Top 10) – for neuroscience research on imagination.
DeepMind's Awards
- Time 100 most influential companies of 2025.
- Cambridge Computer Laboratory Company of the Year (2014).
- Eight Nature front cover articles (2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, two in 2021, 2022, and 2024).
- One Science front cover article (2017).
- Honorary 9-dan Go rank for AlphaGo from Korea Baduk Association (2016), Chinese Weiqi Association (2017), and Japan Go Association (2024).
- Cannes Lion Grand Prix for the documentary AlphaGo (2016).
- WIRED Innovation in AI Award (2016).
- City A.M. Innovative Company of the Year (2016).
Gaming Achievements
Hassabis is a five-time winner of the all-round world board games championship (the Pentamind). He is an expert player of many games, including:
- Chess: Achieved Master standard at age 13 with an Elo rating of 2300. At the time, this was the second-highest in the world for his age.
- Diplomacy: World Team Champion in 2004, and 4th in the 2006 World Championship.
- Poker: Cashed in the World Series of Poker six times, including in the Main Event.
- Multi-games events at the London Mind Sports Olympiad: World Pentamind Champion five times (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003). He was also World Decamentathlon Champion twice (2003, 2004).
See also
In Spanish: Demis Hassabis para niños
