Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis has always been fascinated by intelligence, first mastering the complex board game of chess as a child prodigy and later designing video games. He funneled that same strategic brilliance into neuroscience, earning a PhD before co-founding DeepMind in 2010 with a singular, audacious goal: to solve intelligence and then use it to solve everything else. The London-based company's work sent shockwaves through the world, most famously when its AlphaGo program defeated a world champion at the ancient game of Go—a feat considered a decade ahead of its time. Under Hassabis's leadership, DeepMind's AlphaFold then achieved a monumental breakthrough in biology, accurately predicting the 3D structures of proteins, a problem that had stumped scientists for half a century and which earned him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He now steers DeepMind and its spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, aiming to apply that same AI prowess to drug discovery.