Demis Hassabis, chess prodigy and protein pioneer, your country needs you
Demis Hassabis (Steven Ferdman)
With the world writhing like Laocoön and his sons in the monstrous coils of Covid-19, it is hard to believe that the human mind could find the tranquillity to solve a problem that has baffled scientists for more than 50 years. Still harder to credit is that this discovery floods with light the very rudiments of life, including the coronavirus that is at present such a threat to humanity. So complex are the structures of proteins that their visualisation has defied human intelligence — until now, when artificial intelligence has come to our aid. Best of all, this breakthrough in biology is the work of a British genius.
Demis Hassabis and his team at DeepMind have computed the shapes of proteins, using forms of artificial intelligence that developed out of game-playing computer technology. Himself a chess prodigy, Hassabis went on to create the AlphaZero programme that plays chess like a god and finally defeated the human champions of the hitherto inscrutable game of Go. At the age of 13, he was second only in the chess world to Judit Polgar, who went on to be the greatest female grandmaster in history — a real-life Beth Harmon, the heroine of the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit.
The young Demis was so precocious in computer science that when he won a place at Cambridge in his mid-teens he was told that he was too young. While he was waiting, his Greek Cypriot father and Chinese-Singaporean mother allowed him to join a computer company where he began to work on artificial intelligence (AI). By the time he did his first degree he already knew more about AI than his supervisors. Later, having developed commercially successful computer games, he founded DeepMind. The company was bought by Alphabet, which also owns Google, which allows Hassabis to draw on the resources of the world’s biggest technology corporation while guarding his operational independence. Employing hundreds of researchers, DeepMind is already one of Britain’s greatest scientific success stories. Now 44, Demis Hassabis is poised to become the most important AI entrepreneur in the world.
It is anyone’s guess in which direction the ability to map protein structures will take biological and biochemical science. There are so many possible applications that almost anything is possible. For half a century, a biennial global competition has been held to stimulate progress towards this holy grail of humanity. DeepMind already won it two years ago; since then, Hassabis and his team were essentially competing against themselves.
Yet the spur of competition is a vital factor in the mercurial mind of this man. The chess geek who played weekend tournaments for pocket money will soon be a billionaire. Hassabis is a very modern kind of genius in that he is, by his own description, a generalist rather than a specialist, as gifted in business as he is in science. There is literally nothing that he could not turn his mind to, because the capacity to harness AI is the key that opens all doors. And at DeepMind they have evidently raised teamwork to a new level.
The only challenging problem for a person as gifted as Hassabis is: what to do next? A Nobel Prize cannot be far off and he already has more money than he knows what to with. Unlike Elon Musk, to whom he has been compared, Hassabis is blessed with a modest, likeable personality. The chess world, from which he emerged and with which he stays closely in touch, may be brutally competitive, but it does not brutalise people in the same way as business or politics. Hassabis may be a great English eccentric — he does much of his best work in the small hours of the morning, for example — but he shows no sign of being corrupted by power or wealth.
As Raymond Keene reported last May, Demis Hassabis has already been invited to attend Sage, the Special Advisory Group for Emergencies. If the present Prime Minister has any sense at all — and, with all his faults, he too is a gifted generalist — he should invite Hassabis to Downing Street and ask his advice: not only about how to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic, but on ways to make the UK a leading pioneer in artificial intelligence. This is a revolution that is already in full flood, but the protein breakthrough will only be the beginning.
Just as Winston Churchill deployed the country’s finest scientists in the war effort, so Boris Johnson needs our brightest and best brains to beat the coronavirus and make a success of the post-Brexit era that is now upon us. The chess masters and other boffins who broke the Nazi codes at Bletchley Park included Alan Turing, who later pioneered the computer (including the first one to play chess). Their successors today are the supergeeks at DeepMind, who are expanding the horizons of AI and discovering the secrets of life itself. Who better to help lead the nation’s renaissance than the Turing of our time? Demis Hassabis, your country needs you.
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