Visions don’t come much loftier than DeepMind’s. Described as an Apollo programme for the 21st century, it’s helping to tackle the world’s biggest problems by developing learning machines more powerful than the human brain.
“We’re on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI), developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how.” That’s literally the mission statement of DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research firm. It’s the sheer breadth of that “any” that’s so thrilling. While most AI is “narrow”, able only to learn a single task, DeepMind’s goal is more akin to the brain: a “general-purpose learning machine” that can make sense of whatever it’s applied to – even utilising such human traits as the ability to “imagine” outcomes and reason about the future. As Dr Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO, puts it: “First we solve intelligence, then we use that to solve everything else and make the world a better place.”
“Time magazine listed Hassabis among the 100 Most Influential People for 2017”
DeepMind honed its expertise in the world of games: “a useful training ground”, it now says. It created a program that taught itself how to play and win at 49 Atari titles, with just raw pixels as input. It developed AlphaGo, which beat the world’s best player at Go – one of the most complex and intuitive games ever devised, with more positions than there are atoms in the universe. “A historic milestone for AI,” wrote Time magazine in its listing of Hassabis among the “100 Most Influential People” for 2017, achieved at least a decade ahead of industry expectations.
Visionary is an over-used term, but it’s hard to know how else to describe Hassabis. His own mind is as deep as it gets. A former child chess prodigy, who finished his A-levels two years early, he coded the legendary sim game Theme Park at 17 and took a double-first in Computer Science at Cambridge. He then founded his own successful video games company, returned to academia to complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL, followed by postdocs at MIT and Harvard, before founding DeepMind. “I get bored quite easily and the world is so interesting,” he says. “If I was a sportsman, I’d be a decathlete.”
“Partnering with UCL, DeepMind use artificial intelligence to improve cancer treatment”
Hassabis has maintained his connection with UCL, as DeepMind has moved on to help tackle real-world problems in health, science, energy and more. It’s now partnering with UCL Hospital to improve treatment for head and neck cancers by using AI to help interpret radiology scans – its third major collaboration with the NHS. DeepMind staff also deliver lectures at UCL as part of its Machine Learning Master’s programme.
Founded in 2010 and snapped up by Google in 2014 for a reported $625m, DeepMind has clearly come a long way time in a short time. But geographically, it’s stayed put. Hassabis, too, is north London born and bred. “I absolutely love this city,” he told The Guardian in 2016. “That’s why I insisted on staying here [after the Google acquisition]: I felt there was no reason why London couldn’t have a world-class AI research institute. And I’m very proud of where we are.”
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