[12] In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions for protein structure prediction.

He was subsequently home-schooled by his parents, during which time he bought his first computer, a ZX Spectrum 48K funded from chess winnings, and taught himself how to program from books.

[29][30] Asked by Cambridge University to take a gap year due to his young age,[23] Hassabis began his computer games career at Bullfrog Productions after entering an Amiga Power "Win-a-job-at-Bullfrog" competition.

[23] Hassabis left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he completed the Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997 with a double first.

[24] Hassabis left Lionhead in 1998 to found Elixir Studios, a London-based independent games developer, signing publishing deals with Eidos Interactive, Vivendi Universal and Microsoft.

[38][39] Following Elixir Studios, Hassabis returned to academia to obtain his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London (UCL) in 2009 supervised by Eleanor Maguire.

[41] Working in the field of imagination, memory, and amnesia, he co-authored several influential papers published in Nature, Science, Neuron, and PNAS.

[1] His very first academic work, published in PNAS,[42] was a landmark paper that showed systematically for the first time that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were also unable to imagine themselves in new experiences.

[44] This work received widespread coverage in the mainstream media[45] and was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year by the journal Science.

[47][48] Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, a machine learning AI startup, founded in London in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

[56] Since the Google acquisition, the company has notched up a number of significant achievements, perhaps the most notable being the creation of AlphaGo, a program that defeated world champion Lee Sedol at the complex game of Go.

[59][60] Additional DeepMind accomplishments include creating a neural Turing machine,[61] reducing the energy used by the cooling systems in Google's data centers by 40%,[62] advancing research on AI safety,[63][64] and the creation of a partnership with the National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom and Moorfields Eye Hospital to improve medical service and identify the onset of degenerative eye conditions.

[69] He considers however that a pause on AI progress would be very hard to enforce worldwide, and that the potential benefits (e.g. for health and against climate change) make it worth continuing.

"This is a lighthouse project, our first major investment in terms of people and resources into a fundamental, very important, real-world scientific problem", Hassabis said to The Guardian.