26 Facts About Demis Hassabis

Sir 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 Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser.

Demis Hassabis's father is Greek Cypriot and his mother is from Singapore.

Between 1988 and 1990, Demis Hassabis was educated at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, a boys' grammar school in North London.

Demis Hassabis was 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 wrote its first AI program on a Commodore Amiga based on the reversi board game.

Demis Hassabis then studied at the comprehensive school Christ's College, Finchley.

Demis Hassabis completed his A-level exams two years early at 16.

Demis Hassabis began first by level designing on Syndicate, and then at 17 co-designing and lead programming on the 1994 game Theme Park, with the game's designer Peter Molyneux.

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

Demis Hassabis left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he completed the Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997 with a double first.

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 has warned of the potential dangers and risks of AI if misused, and has been a strong advocate of further AI safety research being needed.

Demis Hassabis said that there is an urgent need for research on evaluation tests that measure how capable and controllable new AI models are.

Demis Hassabis is married to an Italian molecular biologist with whom he has two sons.

Demis Hassabis is the main subject of the documentary called The Thinking Game, which premiered in 2024's Tribeca Festival, from the same filmmaker as the award-winning documentary AlphaGo.

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