Demis Hassabis - when the chess prodigy won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

DeepMind is no stranger to the chess world, as this company has used AI to develop software such as AlphaGo in Go, AlphaZero in chess and AlphaStar in the game StarCraft II. These machines are all much stronger than the best players in their respective subjects. For example, AlphaGo was the first machine to beat Go champion Lee Sedol, and AlphaZero, when it was born, was stronger than any other chess software.

DeepMind's AI products run by Hassabis also extend to many other fields, such as programming with AlphaCode, geometry with AlphaGeometry, mathematics with AlphaProof. Not to mention the Gemini large language model (LLM) which is considered the main competitor of ChatGPT developed by OpenAI.

As Google’s AI lead, Hassabis is at the forefront of a multibillion-dollar race. The British government has repeatedly asked him to advise on technology and AI issues. He was knighted by the British Royal Family this year, before being honored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on October 9, for his work on AlphaFold in biology.

AlphaFold is DeepMind’s software that can predict the 3D structure of proteins, using a database of more than 200 million protein structures collected from many species. Knowing the structure of proteins (also known as proteins) will help scientists better understand how proteins work, understand why diseases occur, and design the right drugs to interact with those proteins.

Hassabis and 39-year-old DeepMind senior researcher John Jumper received half of the Nobel Prize, while the other half went to David Baker, 62, a professor at the University of Washington in the US. Baker was honored for building a completely new type of protein.

As for Hassabis, his dream has come true, which is to use his own talent to influence on a broader level, not just in the chess world. "I hope young people play chess to train their brains, and then use that ability for a tool, which is the computer," Hassabis once said. "Computers can create anything."

There is a story that changed Hassabis' perspective on life, which happened in the 80s. At a chess tournament in Liechtenstein, he met a player who was the Danish all-age champion. The game lasted more than 10 hours, and Hassabis lost.

After the game, he walked along a field, among beautiful mountains, and said to himself: "That chess room is full of great minds, but they are using their brains to compete with each other. Maybe they should spend their energy on finding a cure for cancer or something."

And Hassabis really walked out of the room and left behind a work that is historic, not only for the chess world, but for humanity.