Demis Hassabis is a well-known figure in the field of artificial intelligence research. He is a chess grandmaster and a neuroscientist. On Wall Street, he is less well-known.
This may not last long.Hassabis is becoming Google’s The massive artificial intelligence effort will take the stage for the first time on Tuesday at Google I/O, the annual developer conference.
As an academic who has made some of the most important breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence in the past decade, Kazakh is very clear about his future mission: to bring the latest artificial intelligence technology to every corner of the Google universe to its billions of users Provide services.
“We’re like the engine room of the company,” Hassabis told CNBC of his newly consolidated artificial intelligence unit within Google.
Last month, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai merged Hassabis’ DeepMind with independent artificial intelligence team Google Brain and chose Hassabis to lead the team. After OpenAI’s meteoric rise caught Google off guard, Hassabis now needs to reestablish Google as a leader in generative artificial intelligence. Microsoft.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis attended an event in China in 2017.
Source: Alphabet
For Google, there may be no more important mission than this, especially as new generative artificial intelligence services provide consumers with alternative and more creative ways to search for information online. The business question is — can a long-time researcher like Hassabis be the one to launch a product that consumers will love?
Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” said there was no doubt about Hassabis’ will to win.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more competitive,” said Hinton, who suggested Google acquire DeepMind about a decade ago. “Demis is competitive at the level of an Olympic gold medalist.”
He developed this trait at an early age. Hassabis is a chess prodigy who was once ranked second in the world. He also competed in the World Series of Poker.
Hassabis said consumer experience is also on his side. At just 17 years old, he launched “Theme Park,” a popular video game in the 1990s. Hassabis said games back then had to be fun and easy to play to be successful. After the theme park, he founded his own video game company, Elixir Studios.
Hassabis later co-founded DeepMind, which is widely considered the world’s leading artificial intelligence research laboratory and has attracted some of the most prominent experts in deep learning.When Google acquired the lab Reportedly $500 million In 2014, DeepMind obtained a long-term authorization to operate independently.
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Under Hassabis, DeepMind became known for developing technology through games such as Breakout and AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program that defeated the world’s top Go players.
There is a practical reason for focusing on gaming. “The simulations are completely safe and have no consequences, but they can still learn from them,” Hassabis told CNBC.
During his career at DeepMind and Google, Hassabis dominated the field of artificial intelligence.
even Tesla CEO Elon Musk told OpenAI co-founders in 2018 that they needed billions of dollars to have any chance of competing with Hassabis and Google.
However, Google will lose this advantage as competitors such as OpenAI and Microsoft bring popular products such as ChatGPT and Copilot to the market.
One person who has worked with Hassabis but wished to remain anonymous said that for a while, Hassabis may have been more interested in winning academic accolades than launching a product that people could use. Nature, one of the world’s most influential scientific journals, has reported on Hassabis’ research many times over the past decade.
“Awards are never the end goal,” DeepMind said in a statement to CNBC. “They simply reflect the importance and impact of the research they recognize.”
One of DeepMind’s most important products, AlphaFold, is a breakthrough technology that uses artificial intelligence to help scientists predict the structure of proteins, a grand challenge in biology for decades.
DeepMind has open sourced AlphaFold, essentially giving it away for free.
In 2017, a team of Google researchers outside of DeepMind published groundbreaking research on Transformers, a way to make AI models better at processing the text used for training.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (right) speaks as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (left) looks on at the OpenAI DevDay event in San Francisco on November 6, 2023.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
This triggered a subsequent wave of artificial intelligence innovation, especially OpenAI. Transformers is the “T” in ChatGPT.
Critics argue that Google is giving up on key products and research and helping its biggest rival.
“They’re ahead of the curve, and they’ve been very cautious,” Hinton said. “They are very cautious about generating AI images and large language models. When OpenAI partnered with Microsoft and ChatGPT was used by Microsoft, Google could no longer be cautious.”
Hassabis and Google go on the offensive.
this “Washington Post” report In May 2023, Google announced internally a significant departure from its previous policy. Employees must stop sharing their research with the world and only publish papers after the research has been turned into a product.
AlphaFold became a huge business opportunity, attracting such Eli Lilly and Company and Novartis for drug discovery.
In his TED talk, Hassabis said ChatGPT moment demonstrated that the public discovered the value of LL.M.s and was ready to embrace them.
“When we study these systems, most of the time you focus on the flaws of these systems, the things they don’t do, the illusions,” he said. “We wanted to improve these things first before rolling them out. But what’s interesting is that it turns out that even with these flaws, tens of millions of people still find them very useful.”
Hassabis said it’s time for these products to “transcend the scientific world of scarcity.”
Now, investors are waiting to see whether Google can accomplish what they consider its most important feat and turn cutting-edge science into profits.
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