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Demis Hassabis
Job Title : Founder Company : DeepMind Superhero of AI
Demis Hassabis , dubbed ‘ the superhero of artificial intelligence ’, is a man with a deep understanding of the mind . A classic overachiever , he started playing chess aged four , achieving master standard at 13 . With his chess winnings he bought and modified his first computer , a ZX Spectrum . Meanwhile , he continued to study , completing his A-levels at 16 to gain a place at Cambridge University .
Before going up , Hassabis took a gap year , eschewing backpacking in favour of working for a computer games company , Bullfrog . At 17 , he codesigned and led the programming of Theme Park , an award-winning and influential simulation game that sold more than 10 million copies . Having completed his gap year , he bought a Porsche and turned up at Fresher ’ s Week in it .
Hassabis returned to the gaming industry after his studies and was instrumental in pushing the boundaries of in-game AI . But he would return to academia in 2009 when he went to University College
Google paid
400m
for part of DeepMind in
2014
London to study for a PhD in cognitive neuroscience . His papers – notably one establishing a link between constructive and reconstructive processes in the brain – were considered major breakthroughs in the field .
Inevitably , Hassabis would return to the field of AI armed with a deeper understanding of human intelligence and how its application might be used in technology . He founded DeepMind in 2010 with the intention of “ solving intelligence ” then using intelligence “ to solve everything else .”
In an interview with The Verge in 2017 , Hassabis explained that while the link between AI and neuroscience was important , the subject was too complicated to transfer directly to use-case scenarios common to AI solution finding .
“ If you ’ re an AI expert today and you have no neuroscience background at all and you try getting into it , it ’ s quite daunting ,” he said . “ I think there ’ s something like 50,000 papers a year — I can ’ t remember the exact number — published in neuroscience . So there ’ s a huge body of work to try and make sense of , most of which is not going to be relevant to AI , meaning you ’ re looking for nuggets of crucial information in a huge haystack .”
Hassabis company DeepMind was partially acquired by Google in 2014 for $ 400 million . It has been incorporated into Google Health and was behind the creation of AlphaGo , the program that defeated Go world champion Lee Sedol . It beat him 4-1 at the famously complex game .
18 August 2021