Demis Hassabis continues at the forefront of AI innovation
At the forefront of some fascinating AI innovation is Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO of the leading UK technology company DeepMind. He is a British AI researcher and entrepreneur, as well as a UK Government AI Advisor.
Hassabis grew up in London and was a master chess player from a young age, competing in national games throughout his childhood. He completed his A-levels two years early at the age of 15 and 16, before later going on to study at the University of Cambridge and graduating with a double first in 1997.
In his early career, he was a video game AI programmer and designer, working for several video game companies. He then returned to studying and completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL in 2009 and developed a theoretical understanding of scene construction as a key process underlying memory recall and imagination.
Could AI really be self-aware one day?
Hassabis then became the CEO and Co-Founder of DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. DeepMind was made to be an AI machine-learning start-up business in 2010. Its premise, according to Hassabis when speaking to MIT Technology Review, is to "solve intelligence" and then use intelligence "to solve everything else.” He believes that his work with DeepMind can ultimately lead to a software that can problem-solve for humanity. The company is working with this concept of smart software and creating artificial worlds to attempt to understand difficult decisions.
Hassabis also told CBS that he thinks AI may one day become self-aware, stating that he believes AI to be the most important human invention. He said: "Philosophers haven't really settled on a definition of consciousness yet but if we mean self-awareness ... I think there's a possibility that AI one day could be.” His transfer of knowledge from the human brain to machine learning is conducted with the hope of ground-breaking discoveries in the virtual space.
