DeepMind's Demis Hassabis is AI's grandmaster

Growing up in north London, the child of a Greek Cypriot father and a Chinese Singaporean mother, Hassabis was a child prodigy in chess from the age of 4. He began writing his own computer games at 8, created one of the first video games to use AI at 17, and founded his own video game company not long after graduating from Cambridge University at 20. So perhaps it makes sense that Hassabis's AI startup DeepMind, founded in 2010 and sold to Google just four years later, would achieve its first major successes with AI models that used deep reinforcement learning to rapidly master video games like Space Invaders and Q*bert without any knowledge of the actual rules. That was followed with AlphaGo, which learned the ancient strategy board game of Go and would in 2017 defeat the world's number one human player -- an event that did perhaps more than anything else to awaken the world to the rapid progress of AI. New models could dominate a variety of games even faster, reducing the time and human intervention needed to acquire mastery.