Most 17-year-olds spend their days playing video games, but Britain’s latest Nobel prize winner spent his teenage years developing them.
Sir Demis Hassabis, who was jointly awarded the chemistry prize on Wednesday, got his big break in the tech world as co-designer of 1994’s hit game Theme Park, where players create and operate amusement parks.
Born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother, Hassabis went on to gain a double first in computer science at Cambridge University, launch his own video game company, complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and then co-found the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google bought for £400m in 2014.
The 48-year-old was knighted for services to AI this year.
He is the chief executive of Google’s AI unit, Google DeepMind, and its achievements in using AI to predict and design the structure of proteins has spurred the award of the Nobel to Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, who are sharing half of the award with the other half going to the US academic David Baker.
Hassabis has always extolled the benefits of gaming and has described it as a gateway to AI after, as a chess prodigy, he became interested in how chess computers learn to play the game.
“I think that started sparking off in my mind ideas about how does the chess computer play chess and learning about that,” he told the BBC in 2020. “Many children start by playing games, like I did, and then getting into programming and then using this incredible tool, the computer, to create things.”
His startup was able to build AIs with top-class performances in games including Go, which caused a global sensation at the time, chess and the video game Starcraft II.
Hassabis’s 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 feted by Dominic Cummings, and in July Tony Blair told him he was “advising 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, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Microsoft to produce further breakthroughs.
He is well aware of the potential pitfalls of AI – a technology that can be loosely defined as computer systems performing tasks typically associated with intelligent beings – and last year signed a statement warning that the threat of extinction from AI should be considered a societal-scale risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear war.
In an interview with the Guardian before the inaugural global AI safety summit last year, Hassabis said the risks from out-of-control AI systems were as serious as the climate crisis.
“We must take the risks of AI as seriously as other major global challenges, like climate change,” he said. “It took the international community too long to coordinate an effective global response to this, and we’re living with the consequences of that now. We can’t afford the same delay with AI.”
But Hassabis is also an emphatic believer in AI’s positive potential, and the Nobel prize underscores that. He points to his work with DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts the structure of proteins based on their chemical sequence, as an example of AI’s power to do good.
“I am not in the pessimistic camp about AI obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be working on it,” he said last year.