Demis Hassabis

QuHarrison Terry presents Demis Hassabis, Co-founder & CEO DeepMind (now Google DeepMind), with the WTF Innovators Award for his pioneering research into the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators. As a memento, each of the 34 awardees are gifted a featured song by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. We present “Deep”, produced by Nimso, to Demis Hassabis.

Deepmind is an artificial intelligence research laboratory with the grand mission of solving intelligence and then using intelligence to solve everything else. More concretely, DeepMind aims to combine insights from systems neuroscience with new developments in machine learning and computing hardware to unlock increasingly powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that will advance science and benefit humanity.

DeepMind's contributions to AI have been instrumental in demonstrating the potential of artificial intelligence in various fields, from gaming to biology to energy efficiency. In 2014, Google purchased DeepMind for £400 million.

The company has long focused on training learning algorithms to master games, which make for great training grounds due to their complexity and vast number of possible moves and game states. In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first AI to defeat a world champion Go player, Lee Sedol, in a five-game match. AlphaGo's victory was a significant breakthrough that demonstrated the potential of AI in solving complex problems, which many people believe was a decade ahead of its time.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold is an AI system that achieved unprecedented accuracy in predicting protein folding, a complex biological process that is crucial for understanding disease and developing new drugs.

Demis has continuously pushed the boundaries of what is possible with AI and inspired countless people to further the research and development of the field. He’s been at the leading edge of AGI development for over a decade, which is why he should be on everyone’s radar. – QuHarrison Terry.

Prior to founding DeepMind, Demis Hassabis was a pioneering computer games developer that made ambitious AI simulation games. He was also a Research Fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, leading computational neuroscience research into the neural mechanisms underpinning memory and imagination.