19 Facts About Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis was born on 27 July 1976 and is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur.

Demis Hassabis is the chief executive officer and co-founder of DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Advisor.

Demis Hassabis represented the University of Cambridge in the Oxford-Cambridge varsity chess matches of 1995,1996 and 1997, winning a half blue.

Demis Hassabis was briefly home-schooled by his parents, during which time he bought his first computer, a ZX Spectrum 48K funded from chess winnings, and taught himself how to program from books.

Demis Hassabis went on to be educated at Christ's College, Finchley, a state-funded comprehensive school in East Finchley, North London.

Demis Hassabis completed his A-levels and scholarship level exams two years early at the ages of 15 and 16 respectively.

Demis Hassabis earned enough from his gap year to pay his own way through university.

Demis Hassabis then left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he completed the Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997 with a Double First from the University of Cambridge.

Games designer Peter Molyneux, with whom Demis Hassabis had worked at Bullfrog Productions, had recently founded the company.

Demis Hassabis left Lionhead in 1998 to found Elixir Studios, a London-based independent games developer, signing publishing deals with Eidos Interactive, Vivendi Universal and Microsoft.

Demis Hassabis sought to find inspiration in the human brain for new AI algorithms.

Demis Hassabis continued his neuroscience and artificial intelligence research as a visiting scientist jointly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the lab of Tomaso Poggio, 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.

Demis Hassabis's very first academic work, published in PNAS, was a landmark paper that showed systematically for the first time that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were unable to imagine themselves in new experiences.

Demis Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, a machine learning AI startup, founded in London in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

Demis Hassabis met Legg when both were postdocs at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and he and Suleyman had been friends through family.

Demis Hassabis recruited his university friend and Elixir partner David Silver.

Demis Hassabis has focused on training learning algorithms to master games, and in December 2013 it announced that it had made a pioneering breakthrough by training an algorithm called a Deep Q-Network to play Atari games at a superhuman level by only using the raw pixels on the screen as inputs.

Demis Hassabis has predicted that Artificial Intelligence will be "one of the most beneficial technologies of mankind ever" but that significant ethical issues remain.

Demis Hassabis is a five-times winner of the all-round world board games championship, and an expert player of many games including:.