Demis Hassabis

Sir Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions for protein structure prediction.

Hassabis is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has won many prestigious awards for his research efforts, including the Breakthrough Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Lasker Award. In 2017 he was appointed a CBE and was included in the Time 100, a list of the most influential people in the world. In 2024 Hassabis was knighted for his work on AI. He was listed in the Time 100 again in 2025, this time featured in one of the five covers of the printed version.

Hassabis was born to Costas and Angela Hassabis. His father is Greek Cypriot and his mother is of ethnic Chinese ancestry from Singapore. Demis grew up in North London. 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, 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 Christ's College, Finchley. He completed his A-level exams a year early at 16.

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 level designing 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. He earned enough from his gap year to pay his own way through university.

Hassabis left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he completed the Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997 with a double first.

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.