Chess prodigy, then video-game designer, then something considerably stranger. Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 to build artificial intelligence for the purpose of advancing science. Google bought the lab, and it became the centre of the company's AI work.

AlphaGo is what made the world pay attention. It beat a world champion at Go, a game whose complexity had convinced most experts that machine victory was still years off. They were wrong by a decade.

His ambition was never just to build clever machines, but to use them to accelerate science itself.

The breakthrough that mattered more came in biology. AlphaFold predicted the three-dimensional structure of proteins at scale, which removed a bottleneck that had slowed medicine and the life sciences for fifty years. Hassabis shared a Nobel Prize for it.

His view of AI is unusual among lab founders: not a product, an instrument. Something to compress decades of scientific discovery into years. With DeepMind now pushing into drug discovery, that thesis is being tested on problems where being wrong is expensive.

Hassabis was born in London in 1976, reached master standard at chess at thirteen, and at seventeen co-designed the hit video game Theme Park at Bullfrog Productions. He studied computer science at Cambridge, founded the games studio Elixir, and then took a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, studying memory and imagination.

He founded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, and Google bought it in 2014 for a reported price of around 400 million pounds. AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol four games to one in Seoul in March 2016. In 2023 Google merged DeepMind with its Google Brain team to form Google DeepMind, with Hassabis as chief executive, putting him in charge of the work behind the company's Gemini models.

He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his DeepMind colleague John Jumper and David Baker of the University of Washington. The AlphaFold database now holds predicted structures for more than 200 million proteins and is free for researchers to use. In 2021 he founded Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet company applying the same methods to drug discovery, and he was knighted in 2024.