Demis Hassabis

British computer scientist and neuroscientist, co-founder of DeepMindDeepMind, prop. n.: A London artificial intelligence company, bought by Google in 2014, famous for programs that mastered the game of Go and predicted the shapes of proteins. In 2023 it merged into Google DeepMind., who in August 2026 was named chair of Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMind, prop. n.: Google's main artificial intelligence laboratory, formed in 2023 by joining DeepMind and Google Brain. It builds the Gemini models and scientific AI systems such as AlphaFold. and chief scientist of its parent, Alphabet. A chess prodigy, he co-designed the video game Theme Park (1994) as a teenager, studied computer science at Cambridge, founded the games studio Elixir, and earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London (2009) on memory and imagination. In 2010 he co-founded DeepMind with Shane LeggShane Legg, prop. n.: A New Zealand-born AI researcher who co-founded DeepMind and helped make 'artificial general intelligence' a mainstream term and goal. and Mustafa SuleymanMustafa Suleyman, prop. n.: A British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI, leads Microsoft's effort to build its own advanced AI models, and has written about the difficulty of containing powerful AI. to pursue artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive.; Google acquired it in 2014, and he led it, and from 2023 the merged Google DeepMind, as chief executive until 2026, when Koray KavukcuogluKoray Kavukcuoglu, prop. n.: A Turkish-born computer scientist who co-authored many of DeepMind's landmark papers and in 2026 took charge of Google DeepMind as its senior vice president. took over the running of the lab. Its deep Q-networkdeep Q-network, n.: A method, made famous by DeepMind in 2013–2015, in which a neural network learned to play dozens of Atari video games from screen pixels and the score alone, many at human level., AlphaGoAlphaGo, prop. n.: A DeepMind program that in 2016 beat Lee Sedol, one of the world's best players of the board game Go, a decade or more before many experts expected a computer to manage it., AlphaZeroAlphaZero, prop. n.: A 2017 DeepMind program that taught itself chess, shogi and Go from nothing but the rules by playing against itself, and within hours of training beat the strongest existing programs., AlphaFoldAlphaFold, prop. n.: A DeepMind AI system that predicts the 3D shape of proteins from their chemical sequence, often about as accurately as laboratory experiments. It cracked a problem biologists had worked on for 50 years and won a Nobel Prize. and GeminiGemini, prop. n.: Google's family of AI models and its chatbot assistant, launched in December 2023. Gemini models handle text, images, audio and video and power many Google products. made it a leading AI laboratory. He and John JumperJohn Jumper, prop. n.: An American scientist who led Google DeepMind's AlphaFold project, which predicts the 3D shapes of proteins, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. shared half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction, the other half going to David Baker; he also founded the drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs (2021) and was knighted in 2024.