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Demis Hassabis is a well-known name in the field of artificial intelligence research. He is a chess master and a neuroscientist. He is not well known on Wall Street.
That may not be the case for long.Hassabis is emerging as the face of Google It’s a huge AI effort, and it’s making its first appearance on Tuesday at Google I/O, the annual developer conference.
Hassabis, an academic credited with making some of the most important advances in AI in the past decade, is very clear about the challenges ahead. It’s about bringing the latest AI technology to every corner of Google’s world, serving billions of users.
“We’re like the engine room of the company,” Hassabis told CNBC, referring to the newly integrated AI division within Google.
Last month, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai integrated Hassabis’ DeepMind with another AI team, Google Brain, and selected Hassabis to lead the group. It will be up to Hassabis to re-establish Google as the leader in generative AI after Google was caught off guard by the rapid rise of his OpenAI. microsoft.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis attended an event held in China in 2017.
Source: Alphabet
There may not be a more important mission for Google, especially as new generative AI services offer consumers alternative and more creative ways to find information online. The business question is: Can a longtime researcher like Hassabis become the kind of person who can ship a product that consumers will love?
Jeffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI,” says there is no question about Hassabis’ will to win.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more competitive,” said Hinton, who encouraged Google to buy DeepMind about a decade ago. “Demis is competitive enough to win a gold medal at the Olympics.”
He formed his character from an early age. Hassabis was a child chess prodigy and at one time was the second-rated player in the world. He also competed in the World Series of Poker.
Hassabis says consumer experience is also on his side. He came out with his hit video game called “Theme Park” in the 1990s when he was just 17 years old. Games back then had to be fun and easy to navigate to be successful, Hassabis said. After his theme park, he founded his own video game company, Elixir Studios.
Hassabis would later go on to co-found DeepMind, which became widely recognized as the world’s premier AI research lab, attracting some of the most prominent experts in deep learning. When Google acquired Labs, reported to be $500 million In 2014, DeepMind was given a long leash to operate independently.
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Under Hassabis, DeepMind was known for developing technology through games such as Breakout and AlphaGo, an AI program that beat the world’s top Go players.
There were practical reasons for focusing on games. “The simulation is completely safe and has no consequences, but we can learn from it,” Hassabis told CNBC.
During his career at DeepMind and then Google, Hassabis dominated the AI field.
flat tesla CEO Elon Musk told OpenAI’s co-founders in 2018 that the company needed billions of dollars to have any chance of competing with Hassabis and Google.
But as rivals like OpenAI and Microsoft bring headline-grabbing products like ChatGPT and Copilot to market, Google loses its edge.
At one point, Hassabis may have been more interested in winning academic awards than in launching products that people could use, said a person who has worked with Hassabis and asked to remain anonymous. Told. Nature, one of the world’s most influential scientific journals, has featured research on Hassabis numerous times over the past decade.
“Acclaim was never the end goal,” DeepMind said in a statement to CNBC. “They simply reflect the importance and impact of the research as they perceived it.”
One of DeepMind’s most important products, AlphaFold, was a breakthrough technology that used AI to help scientists predict the structure of proteins, a major challenge in biology for decades.
DeepMind has open sourced AlphaFold and distributed it essentially for free.
In 2017, a team of Google researchers separate from DeepMind published groundbreaking work on Transformers, a way for AI models to better process 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 started a subsequent wave of AI innovation, especially in OpenAI. Transformer is the “T” in ChatGPT.
Critics claim that Google is supporting its biggest competitor by giving away key products and research.
“They had a lead, but they were very cautious,” Hinton said. “They were very cautious about both generative AI images and large-scale language models. And when OpenAI partnered with Microsoft and ChatGPT was used by Microsoft, Google could no longer afford to be cautious. There was no.”
Hassabis and Google went on the offensive.
of The Washington Post reported In May 2023, Google internally announced significant changes from its previous policies. Employees were required to stop sharing their research with the world and publish papers only after the research was commercialized.
AlphaFold has become a huge business opportunity and has secured commercial partners including: Eli Lilly and Novartis For drug discovery.
Hassabis said in his TED talk that the ChatGPT moment showed that the public sees value in LLMs and is ready to embrace them.
“When we work on these systems, most of the time the focus is on the flaws, the things that don’t work, the illusions,” he said. “We wanted to improve them first before releasing them into the world. But interestingly, even with their flaws, tens of millions of people still find them very useful. It turns out that I feel that there is.”
Hassabis said the time has come to bring these products “beyond the world of rarefied science.”
Investors are now watching to see if Google can accomplish what they consider its most important feat yet and turn its cutting-edge science into profit.