In recent years, artificial intelligence has moved out of the pages of science fiction and into everyday life.
Today we are surrounded by AI systems like Gemini, ChatGPT, Dall-E, CoPilot and many others, but Google DeepMind is somewhat different.
Launched in 2010, DeepMind is a company whose goal is to develop artificial general intelligence, often called AGI.
What does Google’s DeepMind do?
While many AI systems in use today are very effective at accomplishing specific types of tasks for which they were trained, the goal of AGI is to build human-like intelligence capable of learning, reason and solve problems on a wide range of topics and problems. tasks in a multitude of areas.
In other words, it is designed to mimic human intelligence.
This is different from systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, which are narrow AI systems that are very effective at the specific task of understanding natural language well enough to provide useful information via human-like interactions.
Of course, DeepMind has not yet reached AGI, but has nevertheless made impressive achievements. In practice, DeepMind has been applied to solving real-world problems in healthcare, science, and engineering. He is perhaps most famous, however, for his mastery of extremely difficult games.
In 2015, for example, DeepMind’s AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a human opponent in Go (a game considered much more complex than chess). Less than two years later, AlphaGo beat the world’s top-ranked Go player.
Who runs Google’s DeepMind?
Demis Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind. Getty Images
DeepMind was created in 2010 by a trio of computer engineers at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, and early research focused on training AI systems to play games without any instruction – the software would learn games like Breakout, Pong and Space. Invader through trial and error, eventually mastering the rules and becoming an expert at the games.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for between $400 million and $650 million. Today, the company remains part of Google’s Alphabet business portfolio, where Demis Hassabis, one of DeepMinds’ three original founders, continues to lead AGI’s development as CEO.
In April 2023, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google would merge DeepMind with Google Research’s Brain team to create a single AI unit – named Google DeepMind – to “help us build better systems, more safely and responsibly.
Google DeepMind remains primarily based in London, but also has researchers in Montreal, Canada, and at Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California.
What is the difference between DeepMind and OpenAI?
Of course, DeepMind is not alone in its AI research and development; it has a number of competitors, including headline-grabbing OpenAI.
These two companies, however, take a very different approach to AI development. DeepMind, for example, is a for-profit subsidiary of Google’s Alphabet, Inc., while OpenAI was initially created as a non-profit organization, before moving to a “capped profit” model.
Both companies have developed AI models and applications in ways that have contributed to AI research in sometimes complementary ways. While DeepMind mastered Go with AlphaGo, for example, OpenAI developed Generative Pre-trained Transformer language models (e.g., ChatGPT) that allow machines to better understand natural language, for more interactive and immersive experiences.
Do you need a PhD to work at DeepMind?
Given the sheer complexity of what DeepMind is developing, one might assume that potential employees might all need a Ph.D. In reality, this is not true. Google is hiring large numbers of less-educated researchers and computer engineers to help advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence.
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