From Chess Prodigy to Nobel Laureate: Demis Hassabis Maps the Path From Intelligence to Science

Demis Hassabis, the neuroscientist and DeepMind CEO who once beat the world's best Go players with artificial intelligence, has now achieved one of science's highest honors: the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded for developing AlphaFold2, a system that solved a half-century-old puzzle in structural biology. The prize recognizes how Hassabis and co-winner John Jumper harnessed machine learning to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences—work that has since reshaped drug discovery and enabled researchers to understand disease mechanisms at a molecular level.