Demis Hassabis

Demosthenes "Demis" Hassabis[4][5] [6] (born 27 July 1976) is a significant figure in artificial intelligence. He is a British researcher, neuroscientist, video game designer, entrepreneur, and five times winner of the Pentamind board games championship.[1][7][8][9]

Demosthenes Hassabis

Demis Hassabis Royal Society.jpg
Demis Hassabis at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2018
Born (1976-07-27) 27 July 1976 (age 48)
London, England, UK
NationalityBritish
EducationChrist's College, Finchley
Alma mater
Known for
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisNeural processes underpinning episodic memory (2009)
InfluencesPeter Molyneux
Websitedemishassabis.com

Hassabis and John M. Jumper were awarded half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding predictions.[10][11]

Career

Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, a machine learning AI startup, founded in London in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Hassabis met Legg when both were postdocs at University College London's Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and he and Suleyman had been friends through family.[12] Hassabis also recruited his university friend and Elixir partner David Silver.[13]

DeepMind's mission is to "solve intelligence" and then use intelligence "to solve everything else".[14] More concretely, DeepMind aims to use powerful general-purpose learning algorithms to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The company was bought by Google for £400 million.

They created AlphaGo, a program which defeated world champion Lee Sedol at the complex game of Go. Go had been considered a holy grail of AI, for its high number of possible board positions and resistance to existing programming techniques.[15][16] However, AlphaGo beat European champion Fan Hui 5-0 in October 2015 before winning 4-1 against former world champion Lee Sedol in March 2016.[17]

More recently, DeepMind turned its artificial intelligence to protein-folding, one of the toughest problems in science. In December 2018, DeepMind's tool AlphaFold won the 13th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) by successfully predicting the most accurate structure for 25 out of 43 proteins.

Although Hassabis is expert at many games, he does not program specific rules into Deep Mind. For Go and chess, the machine played many games with itself, learning from its results. In other words it taught itself how to play, given the basic rules of the game.

Honors

Demis Hassabis Media

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Demis Hassabis on IMDb
  2. Castelvecchi, Davide; Gibney, Elizabeth; Cressey, Daniel; Tollefson, Jeff; Butler, Declan; Van Noorden, Richard; Reardon, Sara; Ledford, Heidi; Witze, Alexandra (2016). "Nature's 10". Nature. 540 (7634): 507–515. Bibcode:2016Natur.540..507.. doi:10.1038/540507a. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 30905952.
  3. "Mind Sports Olympiad contestant page for Demis Hassabis". Mind Sports Olympiad. Retrieved 26 April 2019.
  4. Οι άγνωστοι και εκκεντρικοί Ελληνες κροίσοι του Λονδίνου
  5. Η Τεχνητή Νοημοσύνη στη μάχη με τον κορονοϊό (Covid-19)
  6. 6.0 6.1 "Demis Hassabis". royalsociety.org.
  7. Demis Hassabis: the secretive computer boffin with the £400 million brain. 28 January 2014. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10602390/Demis-Hassabis-the-secretive-computer-boffin-with-the-400-million-brain.html. 
  8. Silver, David; Huang, Aja; Maddison, Chris J.; Guez, Arthur; Sifre, Laurent; Driessche, George van den; Schrittwieser, Julian; Antonoglou, Ioannis; Panneershelvam, Veda; Lanctot, Marc; Dieleman, Sander; Grewe, Dominik; Nham, John; Kalchbrenner, Nal; Sutskever, Ilya; Lillicrap, Timothy; Leach, Madeleine; Kavukcuoglu, Koray; Graepel, Thore; Hassabis, Demis (28 January 2016). "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search". Nature. 529 (7587): 484–489. Bibcode:2016Natur.529..484S. doi:10.1038/nature16961. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 26819042. S2CID 515925. 
  9. Mnih, Volodymyr; Kavukcuoglu, Koray; Silver, David; Rusu, Andrei A.; Veness, Joel; Bellemare, Marc G.; Graves, Alex; Riedmiller, Martin; Fidjeland, Andreas K.; Ostrovski, Georg; Petersen, Stig; Beattie, Charles; Sadik, Amir; Antonoglou, Ioannis; King, Helen; Kumaran, Dharshan; Wierstra, Daan; Legg, Shane; Hassabis, Demis (2015). "Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning". Nature. 518 (7540): 529–533. Bibcode:2015Natur.518..529M. doi:10.1038/nature14236. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 25719670. S2CID 205242740.
  10. "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024". Nobel Media AB. Retrieved 9 October 2024.
  11. "Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 9 October 2024.
  12. Rowan, David (22 June 2015), "DeepMind: Inside Google's Super Brain", Wired
  13. Metz, Cade (19 May 2016), "What the AI Behind AlphaGo Can Teach Us About Being Human", Wired
  14. Simonite, Tom (31 March 2016), "How Google Plans to Solve Artificial Intelligence", MIT Technology Review
  15. Koch, Christof (19 March 2016). "How the Computer Beat the Go Master" (in en). Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-computer-beat-the-go-master/. 
  16. Hassabis, Demis (21 April 2017). "The mind in the machine: Demis Hassabis on artificial intelligence". Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/048f418c-2487-11e7-a34a-538b4cb30025. 
  17. Metz, Cade (27 January 2016), "In a huge breakthrough, Google's AI beats a top player at the game of Go", Wired
  18. "Distinguished scientists elected as Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society". The Royal Society. Royal Society.