DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British-American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014, and merged with Google AI's Google Brain division to become Google DeepMind in April 2023. The company is headquartered in London, with research centres in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and Switzerland. In 2014, DeepMind introduced neural Turing machines (neural networks that can access external memory like a conventional Turing machine). The company has created many neural network models trained with reinforcement learning to play video games and board games. It made headlines in 2016 after its AlphaGo program beat Lee Sedol, a Go world champion, in a five-game match, which was later featured in the documentary AlphaGo. A more general program, AlphaZero, beat the most powerful programs playing go, chess and shogi (Japanese chess) after a few days of play against itself using reinforcement learning. DeepMind has since trained models for game-playing (MuZero, AlphaStar), for mathematics (AlphaGeometry, FunSearch), and for algorithm discovery (AlphaEvolve, AlphaDev, AlphaTensor). In 2020, DeepMind made significant advances in the problem of protein folding with AlphaFold, which achieved state of the art records on benchmark tests for protein folding prediction. In July 2022, it was announced that over 200 million predicted protein structures, representing virtually all known proteins, would be released on the AlphaFold database. Google DeepMind has become responsible for the development of two large language model families: the proprietary Gemini and open-weight Gemma, as well as other generative AI models, such as Imagen (text-to-image), Veo (text-to-video), and Lyria (text-to-music).
History The start-up was founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman in November 2010. Hassabis and Legg first met at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London (UCL). The goal of the founders is to create a general-purpose AI that can be useful and effective for almost anything. Hassabis said that the start-up began working on artificial intelligence technology by teaching it how to play Atari video games from the seventies and eighties including Breakout, Pong, and Space Invaders. AI was introduced to the games without any programmed knowledge of how to play. After a period flailing around, AI would eventually learn what worked, and over time even become an expert in it. "The cognitive processes which the AI goes through are said to be very like those of a human who had never seen the game would use to understand and attempt to master it."
Major venture capital firms Horizons Ventures and Founders Fund invested in the company, as well as entrepreneurs Scott Banister, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. Jaan Tallinn was an early investor and an adviser to the company. DeepMind needed a well-funded backer to pay its employees, provide compute resources and further expand. It was courted by Facebook, Musk, Google and some others. On 26 January 2014, Google confirmed its acquisition of DeepMind for a price reportedly ranging between $400 million and $650 million. 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 from Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Looking for opportunities to benefit society, DeepMind started a pilot program with the NHS to modernize its information systems which were often still using plain paper and fax machines. In September 2015, DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust signed their initial information sharing agreement to co-develop a clinical task management app, Streams. After Google's acquisition the company established an artificial intelligence ethics board. The ethics board for AI research was a mystery, with both Google and DeepMind declining to reveal who sat on the board. DeepMind opened a new unit called DeepMind Ethics and Society and focused on the ethical and societal questions raised by artificial intelligence featuring prominent philosopher Nick Bostrom as advisor. In October 2017, DeepMind launched a new research team to investigate AI ethics. In December 2019, co-founder Suleyman announced he would be leaving DeepMind to join the parent company Google, working in a policy role. In April 2023, DeepMind merged with Google AI's Google Brain division to form Google DeepMind, as part of the company's continued efforts to accelerate work on AI in response to OpenAI's release of ChatGPT to the general public. This marked the end of a years-long struggle from DeepMind executives to secure greater autonomy from Google. In the summer of 2026, DeepMind moved into Google's Platform 37 building in King's Cross Central.
Products and technologies As of 2020, DeepMind has published over a thousand papers, including thirteen papers that were accepted by Nature or Science. DeepMind received media attention during the AlphaGo period; according to a LexisNexis search, 1842 published news stories mentioned DeepMind in 2016, declining to 1363 in 2019.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
