Demis Hassabis

Sir Demis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence researcher and former video game designer who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and led it, following its acquisition by Google in 2014, to become one of the world's foremost AI research organisations. A child chess prodigy, he studied computer science at Cambridge and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London before turning his research toward building machines that learn and think.

Hassabis rose to global prominence for DeepMind's AlphaGo system, which defeated world champion Go player Lee Sedol in 2016, a landmark long thought to be a decade away. He followed this with AlphaFold, a system that predicted the three-dimensional structure of nearly all known proteins, a breakthrough hailed as one of the most significant scientific advances of the century and now used by millions of researchers studying disease and drug discovery.

In 2024 Hassabis and DeepMind colleague John Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, making Hassabis one of the few individuals to receive a Nobel Prize for work in artificial intelligence. He was knighted by the UK in 2024 for services to AI, and has continued to argue publicly for AI's potential to accelerate scientific discovery, from materials science to healthcare.

In August 2026, Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day operational leadership of Google DeepMind, moving into the roles of chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs, the AI-driven drug discovery company he founded in 2021. Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind's chief technology officer, assumed operational leadership reporting to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai.

Hassabis has described the restructuring as allowing him to focus on long-term scientific direction as the field moves closer to artificial general intelligence. He remains one of the most credentialed and widely respected figures in AI, uniquely positioned at the intersection of frontier research, drug discovery and corporate strategy at one of the world's largest technology companies.