Demis Hassabis · California · Anthropic · OpenAI · Gemini · Google · The Guardian Technology
Google DeepMind enters a new era as co-founder Demis Hassabis shifts AI role
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When Sir Demis Hassabis said AI had brought the world to a “pivotal moment in human history” last month, he knew another big change was imminent.
Key facts
- It’s hugely problematic for Google,” said Jeremy Nixon, a former AI researcher at Google and founder of Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, a startup
- The Nobel prize-winning head of Google DeepMind, Google’s AI unit, announced this week he was relinquishing his day-to-day duties as chief executive and becoming chair
- Google’s two AI labs, London-based DeepMind and California-based Google Brain, were merged into Google DeepMind under Hassabis’s leadership three years ago
- Hassabis’s move was announced alongside the departure of Jeff Dean, a veteran Google engineer and DeepMind’s chief scientist, who is leaving along with three other top researchers to form an AI
Summary
This shift was closer to home. These included building the AlphaGo system that mastered the Chinese board game Go and developing AlphaFold, a programme that predicts the 3D structure of proteins. A former Google executive said the leadership overhaul showed London-based DeepMind being brought firmly into the orbit of its parent in Mountain View, California. “The era of DeepMind as an independent actor is over and the obvious sign of that is you have gone from a charismatic founder-leader to appointing Koray in a non-CEO leadership role.