Demis Hassabis: from game developer to Nobel Prize winner
Demis Hassabis taught himself to code on a Commodore Amiga as a kid, became a lead developer on the game Theme Park (which sold over a million copies), studied computer science, ran a studio building AI-native games, then went back to school to do a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. He started a company — DeepMind — that was funded by Peter Thiel, folded every protein on the planet, and created an AI that beat the world's best Go player (a game with more combinations than atoms in the universe). Google bought DeepMind in 2014. That acquisition was reportedly a reason Elon Musk started OpenAI — he felt that much AI capability concentrated in one company's hands was too dangerous. Hassabis was knighted in 2024 and won the Nobel Prize the same year.
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