Neuroscientist and co-founder Google Deep Mind
London
In 2010, Hassabis co-founded DeepMind Technologies, a London-based machine learning AI startup.
DeepMind’s mission is to ‘solve intelligence’ and then use intelligence ‘to solve everything else’. More concretely, DeepMind aims to meld insights from neuroscience and machine learning with new developments in computing hardware to unlock increasingly powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that will work towards the creation of an artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company has focused on training learning algorithms to master games, and in December 2013 it famously announced that it had made a pioneering breakthrough by training an algorithm called a Deep Q-Network (DQN) to play Atari games at a superhuman level by only using the raw pixels on the screen as inputs. DeepMind’s early investors included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Li Ka-Shing, and Jaan Tallinn. In 2014, Google purchased DeepMind for £400 million, leading to its rechristening as ‘Google DeepMind’, although it has remained an independent entity based in London
