Most 17-year-olds spend their days playing video games, but Britain’s youngest Nobel laureate spent his teenage years developing them.
Sir Demis Hassabis, who was jointly awarded the chemistry prize got his big break in the tech world on Wednesday as co-designer of the 1994 hit game Theme Park, where players create and run theme parks.
Born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother, Hassabis achieved a double first in computer science at the University of Cambridge, completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and co-founded the artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind, what Google bought for £400 million in 2014.
The 48-year-old was knighted this year for services to AI.
He is the CEO of Google’s AI unit, Google DeepMind, and his achievements in using AI to predict and design the structure of proteins prompted the awarding of the Nobel to Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, who half of the award share with the other half going to the American academic David Baker.
Hassabis has always extolled the benefits of games, describing them as a gateway to AI after he became interested in how chess computers learn to play the game as a chess prodigy.
“I think it started to spark ideas in my mind about how the chess computer plays and learns about chess,” he told the BBC in 2020. “A lot of kids start by playing games, like me, and then start programming and then use this incredible tool, the computer, to create things.”
His startup has been able to build AIs with top-class performances in games, including Go, which is a global sensation at the time, chess and the video game Starcraft II.
Hassabis’ expertise is sought after. He attended a meeting of the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in 2020 to advise on its Covid-19 response and was celebrated by Dominic Cummings, and in July Tony Blair told him he “advises the new government to talk to you”.
As the leader of Google’s AI efforts, Hassabis is at the forefront of a multibillion-dollar AI boom in which US tech companies are playing a leading role, with Google competing against the likes of Meta, ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Microsoft to deliver further breakthroughs.
Well aware of the potential pitfalls of AI – a technology loosely defined as computer systems that perform tasks typically associated with intelligent beings – he signed a statement last year warning that the threat of extinction from AI as ‘a risk on a societal scale on par with pandemics and nuclear war.
In an interview with the Guardian ahead of the first global AI security summit last year, Hassabis said the risks of out-of-control AI systems were as serious as the climate crisis.
“We need to take the risks of AI as seriously as other major global challenges, such as climate change,” he said. “It took the international community too long to coordinate an effective global response to this, and we are now living with the consequences. We cannot afford the same delay with AI.”
But Hassabis is also an emphatic believer in AI’s positive potential, and the Nobel Prize highlights this. He points to his work with DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts the structure of proteins based on their chemical sequence, such as an example of AI’s power to do good.
“Of course I’m not in the pessimistic camp about AI, otherwise I wouldn’t have worked on it,” he said last year.
