Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, ran it as chief executive until August 2026, and is now Alphabet's chief scientist and chair of Google DeepMind. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AI work on predicting protein structures.
Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, ran it as chief executive until August 2026, and is now Alphabet's chief scientist and chair of Google DeepMind. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AI work on predicting protein structures.
Hassabis grew up in North London and was a chess master standard player at 13, with an Elo rating of 2300. Asked by Cambridge to take a gap year because of his age, he joined Bullfrog Productions and, at 17, co-designed and lead-programmed the 1994 simulation game Theme Park with Peter Molyneux. He then completed the Computer Science Tripos at Queens' College, Cambridge, graduating in 1997 with a double first.
After Cambridge he was lead AI programmer at Molyneux's Lionhead Studios on Black & White. In 1998 he founded Elixir Studios in London, which made Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius; the studio sold its rights and closed in April 2005. Hassabis then took a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL in 2009, looking to the brain for ideas for new AI algorithms. His work linking memory and imagination was listed by Science among the top 10 breakthroughs of the year.
In 2010 he co-founded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, aiming to build general-purpose learning algorithms. In December 2013 it showed a system that played Atari games at a superhuman level from raw pixels. Google bought DeepMind in 2014 for £400 million. Its AlphaGo program beat Go champion Lee Sedol 4–1 in March 2016, and its systems cut the energy used to cool Google's data centers by 40%. Hassabis also co-founded Isomorphic Labs, which he runs as chief executive.
In August 2026 Alphabet moved Hassabis out of the Google DeepMind chief executive seat in favor of Koray Kavukcuoglu, and he became Alphabet's chief scientist and the lab's chair. The Inference reported that a tracker counted 112 DeepMind alumni starting companies in 18 months, a run that matches his step back. He has endorsed Anthropic chief Dario Amodei's call for a “narrow waiver” from antitrust law so AI labs can coordinate the pace of frontier work.
Sources · written 16 October 2026