Demis Hassabis: from video game designer to Nobel Prize winner | Nobel Prizes

Most 17-year-olds spend their days playing video games, but Britain's youngest Nobel laureate spent his teenage years creating them.

Sir Demis Hassabis, who shared the chemistry prize on Wednesday, got his big break in the tech world as co-designer of the hit 1994 game Theme Park, in which players create and run amusement parks.

Hassabis was born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother. Hassabis then gained a double degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge, a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and co-founded the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google bought for £400 million in 2014.

The 48-year-old was knighted this year for his contributions to AI.

He is the managing director of Google's AI division, Google DeepMind, and his achievements in using AI to predict and design the structure of proteins led to the Nobel Prize being awarded to Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, who share half of the award the other half goes to the US academic David Baker.

Hassabis has always extolled the virtues of gaming, describing it as a gateway to AI after becoming interested as a chess prodigy in how chess computers learn to play the game.

“I think that sparked in me the idea of ​​how the chess computer plays chess and how to learn about it,” he told the BBC in 2020. “A lot of kids start out playing games, like I did, and then get into coding and coding. Then I used this incredible tool, the computer, to create things.”

His startup was able to build AIs with world-class performance in games, including Go, which was making a global splash at the time, chess, and the video game Starcraft II.

Hassabis’ expertise is in demand. He attended a meeting of the UK government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in 2020 to discuss its response to Covid-19 and was feted by Dominic Cummings, and in July Tony Blair told him he would “advise the new government to to talk to you.”

As the leader of Google's AI efforts, Hassabis is at the forefront of a multi-billion dollar AI boom in which US tech companies are playing a leading role and Google is competing with companies like Meta, ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Microsoft to make further breakthroughs.

He is aware of the potential pitfalls of AI – a technology that can be broadly defined as computer systems that perform tasks normally associated with intelligent beings – and signed a statement last year warning that it faces the risk of extinction AI should be viewed as a societal risk equivalent to pandemics and nuclear war.

In an interview with the Guardian ahead of the first global AI security summit 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 has taken the international community too long to coordinate an effective global response and we are now living with the consequences of that. With AI, we cannot afford the same delay.”

But Hassabis also strongly believes in the positive potential of AI, and the Nobel Prize 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 AI's ability to do good.

“I'm obviously not pessimistic about AI, otherwise I wouldn't be working on it,” he said last year.