Demis Hassabis
CEO · Google DeepMind
Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Nobel laureate, and the driving force behind AlphaGo and AlphaFold.
Who Is Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis is the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind. A child chess prodigy turned game designer turned neuroscientist, he founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google in 2014, where it became one of the world’s leading AI research labs.
What He Built
DeepMind under Hassabis produced a string of landmark results: AlphaGo, the first program to beat a world champion at Go; AlphaZero, which mastered chess and shogi from self-play alone; and AlphaFold, which solved the decades-old problem of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences.
Why He Matters
Hassabis represents the science-first wing of AI — the belief that AI’s greatest value is as a tool to accelerate discovery in biology, chemistry, and physics. In 2024 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s impact on structural biology. As head of the merged Google DeepMind, he now also leads the development of the Gemini model family, putting him at the center of both frontier research and commercial AI.