Demis Hassabis: from online sport fashion designer to Nobel prize winner – Guardian
Most 17-year-olds inform their days playing video games, however Britain’s most modern Nobel prize winner spent his teenage years constructing them.
Sir Demis Hassabis, who used to be collectively awarded the chemistry prize on Wednesday, bought his vast ruin in the tech world as co-fashion designer of 1994’s hit sport Theme Park, the set up gamers form and possess amusement parks.
Born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mom, Hassabis went on to carry out a double first in pc science at Cambridge University, entire a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and co-found the factitious intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google supplied for £400m in 2014.
The forty eight-year-former used to be knighted for companies and products to AI this year.
He’s the executive executive of Google’s AI unit, Google DeepMind, and its achievements in the inform of AI to foretell and accomplish the building of proteins has spurred the award of the Nobel to Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, who are sharing half of of the award with the other half of going to the US academic David Baker.
Hassabis has repeatedly extolled the advantages of gaming and has described it as a gateway to AI after, as a chess prodigy, he modified into drawn to how chess pc systems learn to play the game.
“I guess that started sparking off in my mind ideas about how does the chess pc play chess and finding out about that,” he told the BBC in 2020. “Many kids originate by playing games, like I did, after which getting into into programming after which the inform of this unbelievable application, the pc, to form issues.”
His startup used to be ready to form AIs with high-class performances in games in conjunction with Mosey, which led to a world sensation on the time, chess and the accumulate sport Starcraft II.
Hassabis’s expertise is wanted. He attended a gathering of the UK executive’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in 2020 to philosophize on its Covid-19 response and used to be feted by Dominic Cummings, and in July Tony Blair told him he used to be “advising the unique executive to study with you”.
As the leader of Google’s AI efforts, Hassabis is on the forefront of a multibillion-greenback AI enhance correct via which US tech companies are playing a number one feature, with Google competing in opposition to the likes of Meta, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Microsoft to scheme extra breakthroughs.
He’s smartly responsive to the aptitude pitfalls of AI – a expertise that can even be loosely defined as pc systems performing initiatives on the overall associated with lustrous beings – and closing year signed a statement warning that the specter of extinction from AI wants to be regarded as a societal-scale threat on a par with pandemics and nuclear wrestle.
In an interview with the Guardian sooner than the inaugural world AI safety summit closing year, Hassabis acknowledged the dangers from out-of-regulate AI systems were as serious as the climate disaster.
“We should always snatch the dangers of AI as significantly as other major world challenges, like climate commerce,” he acknowledged. “It took the enviornment team too lengthy to coordinate an efficient world response to this, and we’re residing with the penalties of that now. We’re going to uncover a arrangement to’t possess sufficient money the same extend with AI.”
However Hassabis is also an emphatic believer in AI’s particular capacity, and the Nobel prize underscores that. He sides to his work with DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts the building of proteins primarily based mostly totally on their chemical sequence, as an instance of AI’s energy to discontinuance just correct.
“I am no longer in the pessimistic camp about AI obviously, in every other case I wouldn’t be engaged on it,” he acknowledged closing year.
