Demis Hassabis is a British scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur of Cypriot-Chinese heritage. He is the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind — the AI research laboratory that Google acquired in 2014 and which has become one of the world's most important AI research organisations.
DeepMind created AlphaGo — the first computer programme to defeat a world champion Go player — a breakthrough that was widely seen as a landmark moment in the history of artificial intelligence. DeepMind subsequently created AlphaFold, which solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem, a breakthrough with enormous implications for medicine and biology.
Demis was a child chess prodigy who later became a successful video game designer before turning to AI research. He was appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2018 for services to science and technology. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the development of artificial intelligence.