*Not a lot of earth shattering news here for AI fans, but a lot of interesting insight into what Google DeepMind are up to on the level of finding a proper office and figuring out what to mess around with. Also, nice photographs, because it's Wired.
Like protein-folding, for instance
By GREG WILLIAMS
Tuesday 6 August 2019
He is here to inspect what will be the new headquarters of DeepMind, the startup he founded in 2010 with Shane Legg, a fellow researcher at University College London, and childhood friend Mustafa Suleyman. Currently the building is a construction site, ringing with the relentless percussion of hammering, drilling and grinding – there are 180 contractors on-site today and this number will rise to 500 at the peak of the build. Due to open in mid 2020, the site represents, literally and figuratively, a new beginning for the company.
“Our first office was on Russell Square, a little ten-person office at the top of a townhouse next to the London Mathematical Society,” Hassabis recalls, “which is where Turing gave his famous lectures.” Alan Turing, the British pioneer of computing, is a totemic figure for Hassabis. “We're building on the shoulders of giants,” Hassabis says, mentioning other pivotal scientific figures – Leonardo da Vinci, John von Neumann – who have made dramatic breakthroughs.
The location of the new headquarters – north of King’s Cross railway station in what has recently become known as the Knowledge Quarter – is telling. DeepMind was founded at a time when the majority of London startups submitted to the gravitational influence of Old Street. But Hassabis and his co-founders had a different vision: to "solve intelligence" and develop AGI (artificial general intelligence) – AI that can be applied in multiple domains. Thus far, this has been pursued largely through building algorithms that are able to win games – Breakout, chess and Go. The next steps are to apply this to scientific endeavour in order to crack complex problems in chemistry, physics and biology using computer science.
“We’re a research-heavy company,” Hassabis, 43, says. “We wanted to be near the university,” by which he means UCL – University College London – where he was awarded a PhD for his thesis, The Neural Processes Underpinning Episodic Memory. “That’s why we like being here, we’re still near UCL, the British Library, the Turing Institute, not far from Imperial…”
A few floors down, Hassabis inspects one of the areas that he’s most excited about, which will house a lecture theatre. With contentment he considers blue prints and renderings...
