Sir Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. He is the chairman and co-founder of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist of Alphabet, as well as the chief executive officer and co-founder of Isomorphic Labs. In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions to protein structure prediction.
Hassabis is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has won awards for his research efforts, including the Breakthrough Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Lasker Award. He was appointed a CBE in 2017 and knighted in 2024 for his work on AI. He was also listed among the Time 100 most influential people in the world in 2017 and 2025, and was one of the "Architects of AI" collectively chosen as Time's 2025 Person of the Year.
Early life and education
Hassabis was born to Costas and Angela Hassapis. His father is a Greek Cypriot and his mother is a Chinese Singaporean. Demis grew up in North London. His original surname was "Hassapis" (Greek: Χασάπης), meaning "butcher" in Greek, but he later, according to Ingo Althöfer, "executed a point mutation by changing ‘p’ to ‘b’". One of his younger brothers still carries the original surname.
In his early career, he was a video game AI programmer and designer, and an expert board games player. A child prodigy in chess from the age of four, when he first learnt chess by watching his father playing against his uncle, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 and captained many of the England junior chess teams. He represented the University of Cambridge in the Oxford–Cambridge varsity chess matches of 1995, 1996 and 1997, winning a half blue.
He first got interested in technology after buying his first computer in 1984, a ZX Spectrum 48K, funded from chess winnings. He taught himself how to program from books. He subsequently wrote his first AI program on a Commodore Amiga to play the reversi board game.
Between 1988 and 1990, Hassabis was educated at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, a boys' grammar school in North London. He was subsequently home-schooled by his parents for a year, before studying at the comprehensive school of Christ's College in East Finchley. He completed his A-level exams two years early at 16.
Bullfrog Productions
Asked by Cambridge University to take a gap year owing to his young age, Hassabis began his computer games career at Bullfrog Productions after entering an Amiga Power "Win-a-job-at-Bullfrog" competition. He began by playtesting on Syndicate and then at 17 co-designing and lead-programming on the 1994 game Theme Park, with the game's designer Peter Molyneux. Theme Park, a simulation video game, sold several million copies and inspired a whole genre of simulation sandbox games. Despite being offered a seven-figure sum to remain in the games industry, he turned it down. He earned enough from his gap year to pay his own way through university.
University of Cambridge
Hassabis left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he completed the Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997 with a double first.
Career and research
Lionhead
After graduating from Cambridge, Hassabis worked at Lionhead Studios. Games designer Peter Molyneux, with whom Hassabis had worked at Bullfrog Productions, had recently founded the company. At Lionhead, Hassabis worked as lead AI programmer on the 2001 god game Black & White.
Elixir Studios
Hassabis left Lionhead in 1998 to found Elixir Studios, a London-based independent games developer, signing publishing deals with Eidos Interactive, Vivendi Universal and Microsoft. In addition to managing the company, Hassabis served as executive designer of the games Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius. Each received BAFTA nominations for their interactive music scores, created by James Hannigan.
The release of Elixir's first game, Republic: The Revolution, a highly ambitious and unusual political simulation game, was delayed due to its huge scope, which involved an AI simulation of the workings of an entire fictional country. The final game was reduced from its original vision and greeted with lukewarm reviews, receiving a Metacritic score of 62/100. Evil Genius, a tongue-in-cheek Austin Powers parody, fared much better with a score of 75/100. In April 2005 the intellectual property and technology rights were sold to various publishers and the studio was closed.
Neuroscience research
Following Elixir Studios, Hassabis returned to academia to obtain his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in 2009 supervised by Eleanor Maguire. He sought to find inspiration in the human brain for new AI algorithms.
He continued his neuroscience and artificial intelligence research as a visiting scientist jointly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the lab of Tomaso Poggio, and Harvard University, before earning a Henry Wellcome postdoctoral research fellowship to the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL in 2009 working with Peter Dayan.
Working in the field of imagination, memory, and amnesia, he co-authored several influential papers published in Nature, Science, Neuron, and PNAS. His very first academic work, published in PNAS, was a landmark paper that showed systematically for the first time that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were also unable to imagine themselves in new experiences. The finding established a link between the constructive process of imagination and the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall. Based on this work and a follow-up functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, Hassabis developed a new theoretical account of the episodic memory system identifying scene construction, the generation and online maintenance of a complex and coherent scene, as a key process underlying both memory recall and imagination. This work received widespread coverage in the mainstream media and was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year by the journal Science. He later generalised these ideas to advance the notion of a 'simulation engine of the mind' whose role it was to imagine events and scenarios to aid with better planning.
DeepMind
Hassabis co-founded the machine learning company DeepMind in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. He served as its CEO until 2026, when he became Alphabet's chief scientist.
Hassabis met Legg when both were postdocs at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and he and Suleyman had been friends through family. Hassabis also recruited his university friend and Elixir partner David Silver.
DeepMind's mission is to "solve intelligence" and then use intelligence "to solve everything else". More concretely, DeepMind aims to build general-purpose artificial intelligence algorithms. The company was acquired by Google in 2014, and later merged with Google Brain to form Google DeepMind in 2023.
Under Hassabis's leadership, DeepMind achieved several landmark results in Artificial intelligence. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sedol in the board game Go, a feat previously thought to be decades away. This was followed by AlphaZero, which mastered chess, shogi, and Go through self-play. In 2020, AlphaFold 2 solved the protein folding problem, predicting protein structures to near-experimental accuracy, which led to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
DeepMind also contributed to Machine learning research, including the development of the Transformer (architecture) architecture. In 2017, researchers at DeepMind and Google Brain introduced the transformer in the paper "Attention Is All You Need", which became the foundation for large language models such as GPT and BERT. Hassabis's team also worked on reinforcement learning, neural network training, and other areas.
Isomorphic Labs and Alphabet
In 2021, Hassabis co-founded Isomorphic Labs, a company focused on applying AI to drug discovery, and serves as its CEO. In 2026, he transitioned from CEO of DeepMind to chief scientist of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, where he advises on AI strategy across the company.
Hassabis has also served as a UK Government AI Adviser, providing guidance on AI policy and ethics.
Awards and honours
Hassabis has received numerous awards for his work. In 2017, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to science and technology. In 2024, he was knighted for his contributions to AI. He has received the Breakthrough Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award, and the Lasker Award, among others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Personal life
Hassabis is married and has two children. He lives in London. He is known for his passion for chess and has maintained an interest in board games throughout his life.
Legacy
Hassabis is widely regarded as one of the leading figures in the development of Artificial intelligence. His work on AlphaGo and AlphaFold has demonstrated the potential of AI to solve complex problems in science and games. His vision of "solving intelligence" continues to influence research at Google DeepMind and beyond.