Demis Hassabis

Sir Demis Hassabis (born 1976) is the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind. A London-born chess prodigy who co-designed the hit game Theme Park as a teenager, he earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL before founding DeepMind in 2010 with a famously audacious two-step business plan: solve intelligence, then use it to solve everything else. Google acquired the lab in 2014.

AI as the ultimate tool for science

DeepMind delivered the AI era’s most celebrated scientific results: AlphaGo’s 2016 defeat of Go champion Lee Sedol, and AlphaFold, which predicted the 3D structures of essentially every known protein — a grand challenge of biology that had stood for fifty years. DeepMind gave the predictions away free to researchers, and in 2024 Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with colleague John Jumper for the work. He was knighted the same year.

Hassabis frames AI’s destination as “radical abundance” — a world where scarcity of resources, energy, and medicine is engineered away. In an April 2025 60 Minutes interview he said the end of disease may be within reach “maybe within the next decade or so,” and he has predicted the change will be ten times bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and maybe ten times faster. He now also steers Google’s Gemini frontier models, putting him in the commercial race he once kept at arm’s length.

He is not a pure cheerleader: he signed the 2023 statement that mitigating AI extinction risk should be a global priority, has called for international coordination, and says society needs “new great philosophers” to grapple with what is coming. But his bottom line is that the tool is worth building — and that walking away from cures and discoveries would be its own moral failure.