Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg established DeepMind Technologies Limited in November 2010 after meeting at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London. The startup began by teaching AI systems how to play primitive video games from the 1970s and 80s like Breakout, Pong, and Space Invaders.
Google confirmed its acquisition of DeepMind for a price reportedly ranging between $400 million and $650 million on the 26th of January 2014. The sale occurred after Facebook had reportedly ended negotiations with the company in 2013.
By July 2021 the system completed predictions for nearly all human proteins plus entire proteomes of twenty other organisms releasing them onto the AlphaFold database. Over 200 million predicted protein structures representing virtually all known proteins were made available through the database by July 2022.
Gemini arrived as a multimodal large language model on the 6th of December 2023 serving as the successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2 models. The system came in three sizes: Nano, Pro, and Ultra designed to challenge OpenAI's GPT-4.
AlphaDev announced in June 2023 found more efficient ways to code sorting and hashing algorithms improving speed by up to 70% for shorter sequences. The new sorting algorithm entered the C++ Standard Library marking the first change in over a decade involving AI discovery.