Demis Hassabis
Co-founded DeepMind and led AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and Gemini — spanning reinforcement learning breakthroughs, a Nobel Prize-winning protein-folding model, and frontier LLMs.
Demis Hassabis (b. 1976) was a chess prodigy and video game designer before co-founding DeepMind in 2010 with a stated mission of "solving intelligence, and then using that to solve everything else." The lab's first major result, AlphaGo, combined deep neural networksNeural NetworkA neural network is layers of simple weighted-sum-plus-nonlinearity units (neurons) chained together, trained by gradient descent and backpropagation. with reinforcement learning and tree search to beat the world's top Go players in 2016 — a game long assumed to be decades away from falling to computers because of its vast search space and reliance on pattern recognition rather than brute-force calculation.
DeepMind's most consequential result came later. AlphaFold, released in 2020 and open-sourced in 2021, predicted 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences at a level of accuracy that essentially solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, and made its predictions for nearly all catalogued proteins freely available to researchers worldwide. Hassabis and DeepMind colleague John Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work — one of the very few Nobel Prizes awarded specifically for an AIAI (Artificial Intelligence)AI is the field of building systems that perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence — reasoning, perception, language, and decision-making. system's output.
After Google merged DeepMind with its Brain team in 2023, Hassabis took over as CEO of the combined Google DeepMind, now responsible for the Gemini family of models — putting the same organization behind board-game superhuman play, scientific discovery, and frontier LLMsLLM (Large Language Model)An LLM is a large transformer trained to predict the next token on massive text corpora, then fine-tuned to follow instructions — the architecture behind GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama..
See also: Noam ShazeerNoam ShazeerCo-authored "Attention Is All You Need" and pioneered sparse mixture-of-experts models, then left Google to found Character.AI before returning to lead work on Gemini.
Learn more: Reinforcement Learning · Wikipedia: Demis Hassabis
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Co-developed LSTM in 1997, the recurrent architecture that made training on long sequences practical years before transformers existed.
Andrew Ng
Co-founded Google Brain and Coursera, and taught the machine learning course that introduced millions of people outside academia to the field.