Google DeepMind

Google DeepMind

Type	Subsidiary
Founded	September 23, 2010 (2010-09-23) (as DeepMind Technologies)
Headquarters	5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK
Founder(s)	Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, Mustafa Suleyman
CEO	Larry Page
Industry	Artificial Intelligence
Owner	Google
Employees	>100 (May 2015)
Website	www.deepmind.com

Google DeepMind is a British artificial intelligence company founded in September 2010 as DeepMind Technologies. It was renamed when it was acquired by Google in 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. The company made headlines in 2016 after its AlphaGo program beat a human professional Go player for the first time.

History

2010 to 2014

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.

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

Acquisition by Google

On 26 January 2014, Google announced that it had agreed to take over DeepMind Technologies. The sale reportedly took place after Facebook ended negotiations with DeepMind Technologies in 2013. The company was then renamed Google DeepMind.

Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for $500 million

One of DeepMind's conditions for Google was that they establish an AI Ethics board. That AI ethics board remained one of the biggest mysteries in technology, with both companies refusing to reveal who sits on it.

AlphaGo

Main article: AlphaGo

In October 2015, a computer Go program called AlphaGo, powered by DeepMind, beat the European Go champion Fan Hui, a 2 dan (out of 9 dan possible) professional, five to zero. This is the first time an artificial intelligence (AI) defeated a professional player. Previously, computers were only known to have played Go at "amateur" level. Go is considered much more difficult for computers to win compared to other games like chess, due to the much larger number of possibilities, making it prohibitively difficult for traditional AI methods such as brute-force. The announcement of the news was delayed until 27 January 2016 to coincide with the publication of a paper in the journal Nature describing the algorithms used. In March 2016 it beat Lee Sedol - a 9th dan Go player and one of the highest ranked players in the world - 4-1 in a five-game match.

Research

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 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.

Currently the company's focus is on publishing 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.

Deep reinforcement learning

As opposed to other AIs, such as IBM's Deep Blue or Watson, which were developed for a pre-defined purpose and only function within its scope, DeepMind claims that their system is not pre-programmed: it learns from experience, using only raw pixels as data input. Technically it uses deep learning on a convolutional neural network, with a novel form of Q-learning, a form of model-free reinforcement learning. They test the system on video games, notably early arcade games, such as Space Invaders or Breakout. Without altering the code, the AI begins to understand how to play the game, and after some time plays, for a few games (most notably Breakout), a more efficient game than any human ever could. For most games though (Space Invaders, Ms Pacman, Q*Bert for example), DeepMind plays well below the current World Record. The application of DeepMind's AI to video games is currently for games made in the 1970s and 1980s, with work being done on more complex 3D games such as Doom, which first appeared in the early 1990s.

NHS patient data

In April 2016 New Scientist obtained the secretive data-sharing agreement between DeepMind and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, which operates the three London hospitals, where an estimated 1.6 million patients are treated annually. The revelation has exposed the ease with which private companies can obtain highly sensitive medical information without patient consent. The agreement shows DeepMind Health is gaining access to all admissions, discharge and transfer data, accident and emergency, pathology and radiology, and critical care at these hospitals. This included highly personal details such as whether patients had been diagnosed with HIV, suffered from depression or had ever undergone an abortion. This led to public outcry and officials from Google have yet to make a statement but many regard this move as controversial and question the legality of the acquisition generally.

The concerns were widely reported and have led to a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), arguing that the data should be pseudonymised and encrypted.

In May 2016, New Scientist published a further article claiming that the project had failed to secure approval from the Confidentiality Advisory Group of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

External links

• Google DeepMind's channel on YouTube

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