Demis Hassabis was born on 27 July 1976 in London, England, to a Greek Cypriot father and a Chinese Singaporean mother. He grew up in North London and is the eldest of three siblings. From the age of four, Hassabis showed a natural aptitude for board games, particularly chess. At the age of eight, he bought his first computer, a ZX Spectrum, with money he won from a chess match. He taught himself how to code and, at the age of 13, reached master standard at chess with an Elo rating of 2300. He represented the University of Cambridge in the Oxford–Cambridge varsity chess matches of 1995, 1996, and 1997, winning a half blue.
Hassabis attended Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, a boys' grammar school in North London, between 1988 and 1990. He then briefly attended Christ's College, Finchley, a state-funded comprehensive school, before being asked by Cambridge University to take a gap year due to his young age. During this time, he began his career in video games at Bullfrog Productions, co-designing and lead programming on the classic game Theme Park.
After his gap year, Hassabis left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he completed the Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997 with a Double First.
After graduating from Cambridge, Hassabis worked at Lionhead Studios, a company founded by games designer Peter Molyneux, with whom Hassabis had worked at Bullfrog Productions. At Lionhead, Hassabis worked as lead AI programmer on the 2001 "god" game Black & White.
Hassabis left Lionhead in 1998 to found Elixir Studios, a London-based independent games developer. The company signed publishing deals with Eidos Interactive, Vivendi Universal, and Microsoft, and employed around 60 people at its peak. Elixir produced award-winning games such as Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius, which were both BAFTA-nominated. In April 2005, the intellectual property and technology rights were sold to various publishers, and the studio was closed.
Following Elixir Studios, Hassabis returned to academia to obtain his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London (UCL) in 2009, supervised by Eleanor Maguire. He sought to find inspiration in the human brain for new AI algorithms. During his PhD, he published several influential papers concerning memory and amnesia, including in Nature, Science, Neuron, and PNAS. His research on imagination and memory was listed as one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2007 by Science magazine.
After obtaining his PhD, Hassabis continued his neuroscience and artificial intelligence research as a visiting scientist jointly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, before earning a Henry Wellcome postdoctoral research fellowship to the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL in 2009, working with Peter Dayan.
In 2010, Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, a machine learning AI startup, with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The company's mission is to "solve intelligence and then use intelligence `to solve everything else'". DeepMind combines insights from systems neuroscience with new developments in machine learning and computing hardware to unlock increasingly powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that will work towards the creation of an artificial general intelligence (AGI).
In 2014, Google purchased DeepMind for £400 million. Although most of the company has remained an independent entity based in London, DeepMind Health has since been directly incorporated into Google Health. Since the Google acquisition, DeepMind has achieved several significant milestones, including creating AlphaGo, a program that defeated world champion Lee Sedol at the complex game of Go.
More recently, DeepMind turned its attention to protein folding, a 50-year grand challenge in science, to predict the 3D structure of a protein from its 1D amino acid sequence. In December 2018, DeepMind's tool AlphaFold won the 13th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) by successfully predicting the most accurate structure for 25 out of 43 proteins.
In 2021, Hassabis announced that he would be juggling his leadership at DeepMind with the CEO role at the startup Isomorphic Labs, a new sister company in Alphabet that focuses on bringing the power of AI to biotech and medicine.
Hassabis has received numerous awards and honours throughout his career. He was listed in the Time 100 most influential people list in 2017 and was appointed a CBE in the 2018 New Year Honours for "services to Science and Technology". In 2020, he was awarded the Dan David Prize Future Award for his work on AI. In 2023, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, and the Canada Gairdner International Award. Hassabis is also a five-time World Games Champion and a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Hassabis resides in North London with his family and is a lifelong fan of Liverpool FC.