British Computer Scientist, Co-Founder of DeepMind, 2024 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Demis Hassabis (1976– ) is a British computer scientist who in his youth was a chess master and video-game designer, and in 2010 co-founded DeepMind, devoted to combining deep learning with reinforcement learning to explore the path to general artificial intelligence. In 2016 DeepMind’s Go AI system "AlphaGo" defeated the top Korean player Lee Sedol by four games to one, the first time an AI system beat a world-top master in this complex board game long seen as one of the last strongholds of human intuition and creativity, provoking worldwide rethinking and discussion of the limits of AI capability. DeepMind thereafter developed "AlphaFold," which could, from a protein’s amino-acid sequence alone, predict its complex three-dimensional folded structure with an accuracy rivaling the most precise experimental methods — this "protein-folding problem" had troubled biology for more than half a century, and AlphaFold’s breakthrough is thought likely to greatly accelerate progress in life sciences such as new-drug development and disease-mechanism research. Hassabis and the AlphaFold team core member John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this breakthrough, and Hassabis thereby became one of the very few figures recognized across both computer science and the natural sciences by major prizes.
Hassabis was already a master-level chess player in his youth, and thereafter went into the video-game design industry and accumulated rich practical experience, and this growth experience fusing the rigorous logical thinking of board-game competition with the systematic problem-decomposition ability of game design thereafter profoundly shaped the distinctive research-path choice of "training general AI through designed game environments" when he founded DeepMind.
In 2016 DeepMind’s AlphaGo played a five-game match against the top Korean player Lee Sedol, winning by the stark score of four to one, and Go — an ancient board game with more than ten-to-the-170th possible board configurations, long seen as the last stronghold of human intuition and creativity — was thereby proved not a domain AI technology could not cross, this match thereafter widely seen as one of the most symbolic milestone events in the development of AI.
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