Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis is the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, a leading AI lab and a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent company. Credited with making AI more mainstream with his revolutionary work on deep learning and reinforcement learning, Demis is now calling for restraint. Seeking to develop AGI, he wants to create a tool that could think, learn, and be left to solve humanity's significant challenges. However, whilst AGI will be era-defining and drastically change the fabric of human life, Demis discusses the dangers of such technology if used by bad actors in his speaking engagements.

A child prodigy, Demis taught himself to code from books, became the second-best chess player in the world at 12 and completed his A-levels a year early. In fact, Cambridge University asked him to take a gap before joining them because of his young age. Using his gap year wisely, he joined Bullfrog Productions, where he co-designed the game Theme Park with renowned games designer Peter Molyneux. In 1997, he completed a Computer Science Tripos, graduating with a double first from Cambridge University.

Having accumulated a wealth of knowledge in game design at Bullfrog, he joined Lionhead Studios as a Lead AI Programmer. Demis then established Elixir Studios, an independent games developer with leading clients like Microsoft. He also served as an Executive Designer on the BAFTA-nominated games Evil Genius and Republic: The Revolution. Returning to academia, he enrolled at UCL to earn a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, with the intention of learning about the human brain to apply his observations to new AI algorithms. After completing his PhD, he was awarded a research fellowship at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL.

In recognition of his entrepreneurial and scientific contributions, Demis received several awards, including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Princess of Asturias Award, and the Global Swiss AI Award. He has also been named in the 50 Most Influential People in Britain by British GQ, The 100 Most Influential People by Time 100 and WIRED’s Smart 50. Recently, he was included in the Time 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023, and in 2024 he was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing AlphaFold. On a mission to answer life's big questions using AI, Demis envisions a future where AI can discover cheap sources of zero-carbon energy and malaria vaccines. However, he urges caution, citing long-term societal implications and the potential for malicious use of the technology. A foremost expert on AI, machine learning and deep learning, Demis is a world-class speaker to hire.