Demis Hassabis is a British AI researcher and entrepreneur who is co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind. The official DeepMind site describes the organization as led by Hassabis, who heads the unified team that combined Google Brain and DeepMind into a single AI organization.
DeepMind under Hassabis produced AlphaGo, which mastered the game of Go, and AlphaFold, which tackled protein structure prediction. In 2024 Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for protein structure prediction,” recognized together with John Jumper for AlphaFold2, the 2020 model that enabled prediction of virtually all known protein structures.
By turning deep reinforcement learning and neural networks toward grand scientific challenges, Hassabis helped demonstrate that AI could deliver results of direct value to biology and medicine, making him a defining figure in applied deep learning.