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Mentor Series: Demis Hassabis
A Nobel laureate, knight and neurologist, Demis started to shine right from infancy. Born to Singaporean and Greek parents. He was a child prodigy, beginning chess playing at age 4, he reached ELO rating level 2300 at the age of 13. He participated in many junior world championship proceeding to University of Cambridge, Queens College where he studied computer science. He worked a while for Bullfrog and Lionhead studios prior, upon completion of his Bachelors at Cambridge, he delved into entrepreneurship founding Elixr studios, a game development entity. Designing Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius. Afterwards, he pursued a PhD in neuroscience at University College London. After his PhD defense, he proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University for his post doctoral research. Later he cofounded Deepmind with two others and they set on the path to solving the intelligence problem then use intelligence to solve everything else. More generally, Deepmind sought to use artificial intelligence and concepts of gamification to address pressing societal issues. Their first projects were solely based on making computers play games better than human experts. Google saw this promising and acquired Deepmind for a little below $500 million dollars causing the entire team to migrate to Google and its infrastructure. With this and the success from AlphaGo, his lessons from Foldit, by David Baker led to finding a solution to the protein fold problem. Why this? Protein folding is a fundamental requirements to determine the structure of proteins that can further solve the difficult problem of structure of organic and inorganic substances and its combinatorics as well as mutation. The project, Alphafold was a success, leading to his Nobel prize and Knighthood in 2024. His life exemplifies a deliberate attempt to success. He echoes the concept of path for walker than walker for path.