Demis Hassabis’ Quest to Discover Artificial General Intelligence
The British artificial intelligence researcher and Nobel Prize winner is now the head of Google's AI efforts. He has long been on a personal quest to discover the principles behind intelligence.
It is rare for someone to be a competent researcher as well as able to navigate sometimes cutthroat corporate politics. Because he can do both, currently 49-year-old Demis Hassabis is one of the most influential technologists working on artificial intelligence today. Hassabis is currently CEO of Google DeepMind, an organization with notable research capabilities demonstrated by their many technical firsts spanning over a decade of AI research. Such research capacity is surprisingly rare in the crowded field of giant companies eagerly contending to lead the AI industry, perhaps matched by only a few other exceptions such as OpenAI and DeepSeek. For example, under Hassabis, DeepMind built the program AlphaFold to predict protein structures, for which Hassabis was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and was knighted in the United Kingdom.