In the 15 years since it was founded, Google DeepMind has grown into one of the world’s foremost artificial intelligence research and development labs. In October, its chief executive and co-founder Sir Demis Hassabis was one of three joint recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for unlocking a 50-year-old problem: predicting the structure of every known protein using AI software known as AlphaFold.
DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014, was founded with the mission of “solving” intelligence — designing artificial intelligence systems that could mimic and even supersede human cognitive capabilities. In recent years, the technology has become increasingly powerful and ubiquitous and is now embedded in industries ranging from healthcare and education to financial and government services.
Last year, the London-based lab merged with Google Brain, the tech giant’s own AI lab headquartered in California, to take on stiff competition from its peers in the tech industry, in the race to create powerful AI.