FUTURE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Demis Hassabis is co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research company. 

DeepMind has published nearly 1000 papers – including multiple Nature and Science publications – and achieved breakthrough results in challenging AI domains, ranging from Go to StarCraft II to protein folding.

In 2014, the U.K.-based DeepMind was purchased by Google. 

A child chess prodigy, Demis coded the classic game Theme Park at age 17. The game went on to sell over ten million copies.

After graduating from Cambridge University, he founded pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. The journal Science listed his research on imagination and memory as one of 2007’s top ten breakthroughs.

He is a five-time World Games Champion, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2017 he was featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE.

In 2019, Demis told the Economist that “I have devoted my life to building AI because I believe it is going to be the most important technology ever invented. By deepening our capacity to ask how and why, AI will advance the frontiers of knowledge and unlock whole new avenues of scientific discovery, improving the lives of billions of people.”