Most 17-year-olds spend their days playing video games, but Britain’s latest Nobel laureate spent his teenage years developing them.
Sir Demis Hassabis, who jointly received the chemistry prize on Wednesday, got his big break in the tech world as co-designer of the hit 1994 game Theme Park, where players create and operate amusement parks.
Born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother, Hassabis earned a double degree in computer science at the University of Cambridge, launched his own video game company, completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, and then co-founded the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind. , which Google bought for £400m in 2014.
The 48-year-old was knighted for his services to AI this year.
He is the CEO of Google’s artificial intelligence unit, Google DeepMind, and his achievements in using artificial intelligence to predict and engineer the structure of proteins have prompted the award of the Nobel Prize to Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, who They share half the prize with the other half going to American academic David Baker.
Hassabis has always extolled the benefits of games and described them as a gateway to AI after, as a chess prodigy, he became interested in how computers learn to play.
“I think that started generating ideas in my mind about how the chess computer plays chess and learned about it,” he told the BBC in 2020. “A lot of kids start out playing, like I did, and then they get into it. programming and then using this incredible tool, the computer, to create things.”
His startup was able to build AI with top-notch performance in games like Go, which caused a sensation around the world at the time, chess, and the video game Starcraft II.
Hassabis’ experience is sought. 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 speak to you”.
As the leader of Google’s AI efforts, Hassabis is at the forefront of a multibillion-dollar AI boom in which American tech companies are playing a leading role, with Google competing against companies like Meta, ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Microsoft to produce new advancements. .
He is well aware of the potential dangers of AI (a technology that can be loosely defined as computer systems that perform tasks typically associated with intelligent beings) and last year signed a statement warning that the threat of AI extinction should be considered on a societal scale. . risk comparable to that of pandemics and nuclear war.
In an interview with The Guardian ahead of the inaugural global summit on AI safety last year, Hassabis said the risks of runaway AI systems were as serious as the climate crisis.
“We must take the risks of AI as seriously as other major global challenges, such as climate change,” he said. “It took too long for the international community to coordinate an effective global response to this, and now we are living with the consequences of that. “We can’t afford the same delay with AI.”
But Hassabis also believes strongly in the positive potential of AI, and the Nobel Prize winner underlines this. He points to his work with DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts the structure of proteins based on their chemical sequence, as an example of the power of AI to do good.
“I’m obviously not pessimistic about AI, otherwise I wouldn’t be working on it,” he said last year.
