Lunch With Sumiko A Singapore connection

British AI pioneer Demis Hassabis is co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and a winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He tells Sumiko Tan how he spent summers here as a child with his Singapore-born mum.

- LunchWithSumiko

Not many children dream of winning a Nobel Prize when they grow up, but Demis Hassabis did. And win it, he did. In October 2024, the British co-founder and chief executive officer of Google DeepMind received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, sharing it with his collaborator, American scientist John Jumper. The other half of the prize went to American biochemist David Baker from the University of Washington.

The Google scientists were recognised for using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.

Their AI model, AlphaFold 2, has already made an impact in fields such as drug discovery and combating plastic pollution.

"I grew up as a kid reading all the great scientists and philosophers and science fiction, and I wanted to advance human knowledge," Dr Hassabis says.

"Winning a Nobel Prize was a dream from when I was very young – to do some work that would be worthy of that level of recognition."

The Nobel Prize is only the latest achievement for the 48-year-old polymath.

He was a child chess prodigy before teaching himself to code. At 17, he helped to create a video game that sold millions.

After graduating with top honours in computer science from the University of Cambridge, he got a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London.

In 2010, he and two others founded DeepMind, an AI start-up, in London. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported US$500 million.

DeepMind's early work included AlphaGo, a computer program trained to play the notoriously difficult game of Go. In 2016, AlphaGo made headlines for beating top Go player Lee Sedol from South Korea.

Dr Hassabis and his team then worked on protein structures, leading to AlphaFold 2.

In 2023, Google's parent company, Alphabet, merged DeepMind with Google's Brain division to form Google DeepMind.