Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The company was acquired by Google in 2014 for approximately £400 million. DeepMind's programme — to "solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else" — has produced more transformative results than any AI lab of comparable focus: AlphaGo (2016), which defeated the world's best Go players; AlphaZero (2017), which mastered Go, chess, and shogi from self-play; AlphaFold (2020), which predicted the three-dimensional structure of virtually every protein known to science; and AlphaProof (2024), which achieved silver medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Hassabis received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside John Jumper and David Baker for the work on protein structure prediction. This is the most consequential scientific application of AI to date — AlphaFold's predictions are used in drug discovery, vaccine development, and fundamental biology research globally.

Hassabis has said publicly that he considers AI to be potentially the most transformative and potentially the most dangerous technology in human history, and that this is why he wanted DeepMind to be inside Google rather than outside it — to influence how the technology develops from within. Whether this strategy of "safety through integration" has succeeded is a question the AI safety research community debates actively.