In the past few years, artificial intelligence has moved out of the pages of science fiction and into everyday life.
Today, we're surrounded by AI systems like Gemini, ChatGPT, Dall-E, CoPilot, and countless others, but Google DeepMind is a little different.
Launched in 2010, DeepMind is a company that aims to develop artificial general intelligence, often referred to as AGI.
What does Google's DeepMind program do?
While many AI systems in use today are very good at completing specific types of tasks for which they have been trained, the goal of general AI is to build human-like intelligence that can learn, think, and solve problems for a wide range of topics and solutions. Tasks across a large number of fields.
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 good at the specific task of understanding natural language well enough to provide useful information through human-like interactions.
Of course, DeepMind has not yet achieved artificial general intelligence, but it has achieved impressive achievements nonetheless. In practice, DeepMind has been applied to solve real-world problems in healthcare, science, and engineering. She is perhaps most famous for her mastery of extremely difficult games.
In 2015, for example, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to beat a human opponent at Go (a game considered much more complex than chess). Less than two years later, AlphaGo went on to defeat 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 three computer engineers from the Gatsby Unit for Computational Neuroscience at University College London, and early research focused on making AI systems learn to play games without any instructions – the software would learn games like Breakout, Pong and Space. Conquerors through trial and error, eventually master the rules and become experts at the games.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a price tag between $400 million and $650 million. Today, the company remains part of Google's Alphabet business group, with Demis Hassabis, one of the three original DeepMinds founders, continuing to lead AGI's development as CEO.
In April 2023, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google would combine DeepMind with Google Research's Brain team to create a single AI unit — called Google DeepMind — “to help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly.”
Google DeepMind remains primarily based in London, but it 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 AI research and development; It has a number of competitors, including the headline-grabbing company OpenAI.
However, these two companies take a completely different approach to developing artificial intelligence. For example, DeepMind is a for-profit part of Alphabet, Inc. subsidiary of Google, while OpenAI was originally created as a non-profit, before moving to a “profit-defined” model.
The two companies have developed AI models and applications in ways that have contributed to AI research in sometimes complementary ways. While DeepMind perfected the Go language with AlphaGo, for example, OpenAI has developed pre-trained generative 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 profound complexity of what DeepMind is developing, one might assume that potential employees would all need a Ph.D. But in reality, this is not true. Google is hiring a large number of researchers and computer engineers with lower degrees to help develop the latest in artificial intelligence technology.
