Google's Deep Mind

DeepMind Technologies Limited is a British artificial intelligence company founded in September 2010. It was acquired by Googlein 2014. The company has created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a fashion similar to that of humans, as well as a Neural Turing Machine, or a neural network that may be able to access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine, resulting in a computer that mimics the short-term memory of the human brain.

In 2010 the start-up was founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Hassabis and Legg first met at University College London's Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit.[9] On 26 January 2014, Google announced the company had acquired DeepMind for $500 million that it had agreed to take over DeepMind Technologies.

Since then major venture capital firms Horizons Ventures and Founders Fund have invested in the company, as well as entrepreneurs Scott Banister and Elon Musk. Jaan Tallinn was an early investor and an adviser to the company. The sale to Google took place after Facebook reportedly ended negotiations with DeepMind Technologies in 2013. The company was afterwards renamed Google DeepMind and kept that name for about two years.

In 2014, DeepMind received the "Company of the Year" award by Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

After Google's acquisition the company established an artificial intelligence ethics board. The ethics board for AI research remains a mystery, with both Google and Deepmind declining to reveal who sits on the board. DeepMind, together with Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft, is a member of Partnership on AI, an organization devoted to the society-AI interface.

DeepMind Technologies's goal is to "solve intelligence", which they are trying to achieve by combining "the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms". They are trying to formalize intelligence[26] in order to not only implement it into machines, but also understand the human brain, as Demis Hassabis explains:

attempting to distil intelligence into an algorithmic construct may prove to be the best path to understanding some of the enduring mysteries of our minds.

Google Research has released a paper in 2016 regarding AI Safety and avoiding undesirable behaviour during the AI learning process. Deepmind has also released several publications via their website.


To date, the company has published research on computer systems that are able to play games, and developing these systems, ranging from strategy games such as Go to arcade games. According to Shane Legg human-level machine intelligence can be achieved "when a machine can learn to play a really wide range of games from perceptual stream input and output, and transfer understanding across games." Research describing an AI playing seven different Atari video games (Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Seaquest, Beamrider, Enduro, and Q*bert) reportedly led to their acquisition by Google. Hassabis has mentioned the popular e-sport game StarCraft as a possible future challenge, since it requires a high level of strategic thinking and handling imperfect information.