Demis Hassabis is stepping back from running DeepMind to chase scientific discovery

Demis Hassabis was a chess prodigy in London, then a teenage video-game designer who helped create the hit game Theme Park. He studied computer science at Cambridge, founded his own games studio and later earned a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, studying how memory and imagination work in the brain.

In 2010 he co-founded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, with the goal of building general-purpose AI. Google acquired the company in 2014.

From games to biology

DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, a milestone many experts had expected to be a decade away. Its AlphaFold system then predicted the structures of proteins with high accuracy, solving a problem that had challenged biologists for 50 years. In 2024, Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David Baker for that work.

In 2021, Hassabis also founded Isomorphic Labs, a drug-discovery company spun out of DeepMind.

A new role

In August 2026, Alphabet announced that Hassabis would become chair of Google DeepMind and Alphabet’s chief scientist, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over day-to-day leadership of the lab. Hassabis said the change would let him focus on long-term strategy and scientific breakthroughs, including his work at Isomorphic.

What to watch

Isomorphic Labs has said it expects its first drug candidates to reach human trials around the end of 2026. That would be an early test of whether AI can shorten the path from discovery to medicine.

Company

Google DeepMind / Alphabet

Role

Chair & Chief Scientist

HQ

London, United Kingdom

Founded

2010

Section

AI

This profile draws on public reporting and company materials.

Sources: IT Reseller: Hassabis steps back as DeepMind CEO · Qatar Tribune: Google’s AI reset · Wikipedia: Demis Hassabis

Photo: Jay Dixit, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped)