Demis Hassabis was born in London in 1976, became a chess master in childhood, designed his first commercial video games as a teenager and completed a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. He co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with a long-horizon mission to 'solve intelligence', and sold the company to Google in 2014 on the condition that it would retain its research culture.
Under his direction DeepMind built the AlphaGo system that defeated the world Go champion in 2016, then the AlphaFold protein-structure model that has reshaped computational biology and was recognized with a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Hassabis and colleague John Jumper. In 2023 Google consolidated its AI research efforts under his leadership as Google DeepMind, the unit responsible for the Gemini model family.
Hassabis has become one of the most cited public voices on how to combine scientific ambition with safety research, and his laboratory is now central both to Google's commercial AI strategy and to the broader policy conversation on advanced AI systems.