Demis Hassabis
British AI researcher (born 1976)
Who was Demis Hassabis?
Sir Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur. Hassabis was born to Costas and Angela Hassapis. His father is a Greek Cypriot and his mother is a Chinese Singaporean. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. He was appointed a CBE in 2017, and knighted in 2024 for his work on AI. His original surname was "Hassapis" (Greek: Χασάπης), meaning "butcher" in Greek, but he later, according to Ingo Althöfer, "executed a point mutation by changing ‘p’ to ‘b’".
Historical significance
In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions to protein structure prediction. Hassabis is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has won awards for his research efforts, including the Breakthrough Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Lasker Award. He was also listed among the Time 100 most influential people in the world in 2017 and 2025, and was one of the "Architects of AI" collectively chosen as Time's 2025 Person of the Year.
