- Demis is the priestly class of AI
- heās not some running on VC money, heās not traveling the world shaking hands with sheikhs, heās in London in the lab doing kooky british science stuff.
- he doesnāt have to worry about the money like a startup, heās far from the silicon valley mindvirus, he just ships
- while oAI tries to find the right amount of sycophancy, Demis is solving Go, solving worldgen, folding proteins.
- you never see the ego, monk-like demeanor.
some wiki stuff
He is a former child chess prodigy, who finished his A-levels two years early and then programmed the classic game Theme Park at Bullfrog Productions. He graduated from Cambridge University with a Double First in computer science, and founded the videogames company Elixir Studios, producing the BAFTA-nominated Republic: The Revolution.
After a decade of experience in the games industry, Hassabis returned to academia to obtain a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, followed by post-doctoral research at MIT and Harvard.
In 2010, he co-founded DeepMind, a London-based machine learning AI startup. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014. Under Hassabisās leadership, DeepMind has been responsible for a number of significant breakthroughs in AI, including AlphaGo, the first program to defeat a professional Go player, and AlphaFold, which has been heralded as a solution to the 50-year-old grand challenge of protein structure prediction.
He is a 5-time winner of the Mind Sports Olympiad and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024.
He has a friendly rivalry with Elon Musk.