Google DeepMind CEO says his passion for chess led to his career in AI
- Demis Hassabis was a child chess prodigy, achieving master status in his teens.
- In a lecture at the University of Cambridge, the Google Deepmind CEO said chess led him to his first experience with AI.
- After interacting with chess computers, Hassabis went on to experiment with AI programming at home.
Demis Hassabis's first love wasn't AI — it was chess.
Decades before the Google DeepMind CEO would be co-awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — thanks to helping develop an AI tool that predicted protein structures — he was a child chess prodigy playing for the England junior teams.
In a lecture at the University of Cambridge, Hassabis said that his experience with chess led him, albeit indirectly, to dedicate himself to the advancement of AI.
"My journey on AI started with games and specifically chess," Hassabis said. Chess sparked his interest in the nature of intelligence, he added, and got him "thinking about thinking itself."
"You know, how does our mind come up with these plans, with these ideas, how do we problem solve, and how can we improve?" Hassabis said.
Hassabis began playing chess at four years old — by the age of 13, he'd reportedly already achieved master status. Still, for Hassabis, less interesting than the game were the workings of the minds that played it.
"Obviously when you're playing chess at a young age and you're trying to play competitively, you're trying to improve that process," Hassabis said. "And it was fascinating to me, perhaps more fascinating than even the games I was playing, was the actual mental processes behind it."
Hassabis — who later went on to invent AlphaZero, an AI system that taught itself to master chess after learning it from scratch and can now eclipse the world's best players — was first introduced to computers while looking to improve his game.
"We were supposed to be using these chess computers to train opening theory and learn more about chess, but I remember being fascinated by the fact that someone had programmed this lump of inanimate plastic to actually play chess really well against you," Hassabis said.
"I was sort of really fascinated by how that was done, and how um how someone could program something like that," he added.
His fascination with chess computers bloomed into an interest in computing in general, leading to his "experimenting" with the Amiga 500 — an early home computer.
Hassabis said his first venture into AI was building programs to let him play games like Othello.
"Really, that was my first taste of AI and I was hooked from then on," Hassabis said. "And that's, you know, I decided from very early on that I would spend my entire career trying to push the frontiers of this technology."