Demis Hassabis didn’t know he was getting the Nobel Prize in chemistry from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences until his wife started being bombarded with calls from a Swedish number on Skype.
“She would put it down several times, and then they kept persisting,” Hassabis said today in a press conference convened to celebrate the awarding of the prize, alongside John Jumper, his colleague at Google DeepMind. “Then I think she realized it was a Swedish number, and they asked for my number.”
That he won the prize—the most prestigious in science—may not have been all that much of a shock: A day earlier, Geoffrey Hinton, often called one of