Demis Hassabis

Hassabis is a former child chess prodigy with degrees in computer science and cognitive neuroscience from Cambridge and University College London respectively. Hassabis co-created the video game "Theme Park" game when he was just 17-years-old, before going on to found his own videogames company, and eventually DeepMind in 2010. In January 2014, Hassabis sold DeepMind to Google for £400 million in what is Google's largest European acquisition to date. The company made history last year when its self-learning AlphaGo agent beat a world champion at the notoriously difficult Chinese board game Go. Now DeepMind is turning its attention to applying its algorithms to areas that can benefit humanity, including healthcare and climate change. Hassabis was born in London July 27, 1976, to a Greek Cypriot father and a Chinese Singaporean mother. Hassabis is the eldest of three siblings and his parents are teachers. According to The Guardian, his sister is a pianist and composer, while his brother is a studying creative writing. Hassabis now has two young boys of his own. He graduated from Queens' College Cambridge when he was 20 with a double first-class honours degree in 1997. After graduating in 1997, Hassabis worked at Lionhead Studios. He left Lionhead around a year later to found his own videogames company, Elixir Studios, which produced award-winning games for global publishers such as Vivendi Universal and Microsoft. Hassabis sold a 5% stake in Elixir to Eidos, which created the Lara Croft "Tomb Raider" series. The stake was sold for £600,000, valuing the company at £12 million.