Google’s Intelligence Designer
The man behind a startup acquired by Google for $628 million plans to build a revolutionary new artificial intelligence.
Demis Hassabis started playing chess at age four and soon blossomed into a child prodigy. At age eight, success on the chessboard led him to ponder two questions that have obsessed him ever since: first, how does the brain learn to master complex tasks; and second, could computers ever do the same?
Now 38, Hassabis puzzles over those questions for Google, having sold his little-known London-based startup, DeepMind, to the search company earlier this year for a reported 400 million pounds ($650 million at the time).
Google snapped up DeepMind shortly after it demonstrated software capable of teaching itself to play classic video games to a super-human level (see “Is Google Cornering the Market on Deep Learning?”). At the TED conference in Vancouver this year, Google CEO Larry Page gushed about Hassabis and called his company’s technology “one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a long time.”
Researchers are already looking for ways that DeepMind technology could improve some of Google’s existing products, such as search. But if the technology progresses as Hassabis hopes, it could change the role that computers play in many fields.
DeepMind seeks to build artificial intelligence software that can learn when faced with almost any problem. This could help address some of the world’s most intractable problems, says Hassabis. “AI has huge potential to be amazing for humanity,” he says. “It will really accelerate progress in solving disease and all these things we’re making relatively slow progress on at the moment.”
Renaissance Man
Hassabis’s quest to understand and create intelligence has led him through three careers: game developer, neuroscientist, and now, artificial-intelligence entrepreneur. After completing high school two years early, he got a job with the famed British games designer Peter Molyneux. At 17, Hassabis led development of the classic simulation game Theme Park, released in 1994. He went on to complete a degree in computer science at the University of Cambridge and founded his own successful games company in 1998.
But the demands of building successful computer games limited how much Hassabis could work on his true calling. “I thought it was time to do something that focused on intelligence as a primary thing,” he says.
So in 2005, Hassabis began a PhD in neuroscience at University College London, with the idea that studying real brains might turn up clues that could help with artificial intelligence. He chose to study the hippocampus, a part of the brain that underpins memory and spatial navigation, and which is still relatively poorly understood. “I picked areas and functions of the brain that we didn’t have very good algorithms for,” he says.
As a computer scientist and games entrepreneur who hadn’t taken high school biology, Hassabis stood out from the medical doctors and psychologists in his department. “I used to joke that the only thing I knew about the brain was that it was in the skull,” he says....MORE
