Sir Demis Hassabis wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Queens’ alumnus, Honorary Fellow and Fellow Benefactor, Sir Demis Hassabis (1994), has been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. He is awarded jointly with another Cambridge alum; Dr John Jumper (St Edmund’s) and Prof David Baker of the University of Washington.

Sir Demis is a co-founder of Deepmind, an interdisciplinary approach to building general AI systems, which is now a subsidiary of Google. In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.

Sir Demis said it’s an “incredible honour” to receive the Nobel.

“It’s unbelievably special and, you know, it’s actually really surreal, to be honest. It hasn’t really sunk in…The reason I’ve worked on AI my whole life is that I’m passionate about science and finding out knowledge, and I’ve always thought if we could build AI in the right way, it could be the ultimate tool to help scientists.”

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/hassabis/interview/

Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

Sir Demis has been elected as both an Honorary Fellow and Fellow Benefactor of Queens’ College.

“The whole of the Queens’ community is delighted by this wonderful news. We congratulate Demis, an alumnus and Honorary Fellow of our College, on this incredibly important award and on his numerous other accomplishments. His work has already had a huge beneficial impact, and will continue to do so.”

Dr Mohamed A. El-Erian | President of Queens’ College, Cambridge University.

In 2018, the University announced the establishment of a DeepMind Chair of Machine Learning, thanks to a benefaction from Hassabis’s company, and appointed Prof Neil Lawrence to the position the following year.

“It is wonderful to see Demis’s work recognised at the highest level — his contributions have been really transformative across many domains. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next!”

Professor Alistair Beresford: Head of Computer Science and Technology, Robin Walker Fellow in Computer Science at Queens’.

Earlier this year (2024) he was one of three leading experts in the field of Technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be awarded Honours by the King, on recommendation from the UK Prime Minister.

Hassabis’ potential has been shining through from a very young age. He completed his A-Levels 2 years early at the age of 16 and during his gap year, his initial computer games career was so successful that he was able to pay his own way through university.

Hassabis was also a highly skilled chess player. He reached master standard by the age of 13 and then went on to represent the University of Cambridge multiple times in the Oxford–Cambridge varsity chess matches.

“He was my classmate at @queens_college — indescribably smart, funny, and down-to-earth. […] Being friends with Demis was an incredibly humbling experience. Since meeting him, the thought that I might be the smartest person has never crossed my mind[…] I cannot recall being so proud of something recently. Cheers to you my brilliant friend!”
@jeremic_vuk via instagram