Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis’s AI journey had an unexpected start: his early mastery of chess.
Years before Hassabis would receive the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating an AI program that predicted protein structures, he was a child chess champion who started playing the game at the age of four. By age 13, he was a chess master competing against adults in international competitions.
In a lecture earlier this month at the University of Cambridge, Hassabis, now 48, explained that chess got him “thinking about thinking itself” or exploring the mental processes behind complex thoughts.
“How does our mind come up with these plans, these ideas?” Hassabis asked. “Perhaps
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