Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. In his early career he was a video game AI programmer and designer, and an expert board games player. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Advisor. Early life and education Hassabis was born to a Greek Cypriot father and a Chinese Singaporean mother and grew up in North London. A child prodigy in chess from the age of 4, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 and captained many of the England junior chess teams. He represented the University of Cambridge in the Oxford-Cambridge varsity chess matches of 1995, 1996 and 1997, winning a half blue. 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. He went on to be educated at Christ's College, Finchley, a state-funded comprehensive school in East Finchley, North London. He completed his A-levels and scholarship level exams two years early at the ages of 15 and 16 respectively. Bullfrog Asked by Cambridge University to take a gap year due to his young age, Hassabis began his computer games career at Bullfrog Productions, first level designing on Syndicate, and then at 17 co-designing and lead programming on the 1994 game Theme Park, with the games designer Peter Molyneux. Theme Park, a simulation video game, sold several million copies and inspired a whole genre of simulation sandbox games. He earned enough from his gap year to pay his own way through university.