Demis Hassabis
British AI researcher and entrepreneur; co-founder of DeepMind and of Isomorphic Labs, and 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry (shared with John Jumper) for AI-based protein structure prediction.
Key facts
Unless stated otherwise these facts come from Wikipedia (secondary).
- Born 27 July 1976, London.
- Education: Cambridge (Computer Science, double first, 1997); PhD in cognitive neuroscience, UCL (2009).
- Games career before academia: Bullfrog (Theme Park), Lionhead (Black & White), his own studio Elixir Studios.
- Co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman; Google acquired it in 2014 (reported as GBP 400 million).
- Co-founded Isomorphic Labs (launched by Alphabet 2021-11-04) and is its CEO; it applies AI to drug discovery.
- Honours: CBE (2017), Fellow of the Royal Society (2018), knighted 2024, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024.
Work
- AlphaGo (defeated a Go world champion, 2016), AlphaFold (CASP13 winner Dec 2018; AlphaFold 2 near-experimental accuracy, Nov 2020; database of predicted structures for ~200 million proteins).
- Per Wikipedia, led DeepMind / Google DeepMind (after the Google Brain merger) as CEO; current title not verified (see Open items). See DeepMind Research Lab and Alphabet.
- Per Wikipedia, a public advocate of AI-for-science and of AI safety research and regulation, and an adviser to the UK government on AI.
Related vault notes
Sources
- Wikipedia, Demis Hassabis (secondary): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis (fetched 2026-10-05)
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/ (not re-fetched; cited via Wikipedia)
Open items
- Wikipedia states he served as DeepMind CEO “until 2026, when he became Alphabet’s chief scientist”. Only one secondary source seen; not confirmed against Alphabet/Google press. Treat his current title as unverified.
- Exact list of other awards (Breakthrough Prize, Lasker etc.) not checked here.