— Ch. 1 · Founding And Acquisition —
Google DeepMind.
~6 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg met at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London in 2010. They established DeepMind Technologies Limited that November with a clear goal to build general-purpose artificial intelligence. The startup began by teaching AI systems how to play primitive video games from the 1970s and 80s like Breakout, Pong, and Space Invaders. These early experiments used raw pixels as data input without any prior knowledge of game rules. Major venture capital firms Horizons Ventures and Founders Fund invested millions into the company alongside entrepreneurs Scott Banister, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. Jaan Tallinn served as an early investor and adviser during these formative years. On the 26th of January 2014 Google confirmed its acquisition of DeepMind for a price reportedly ranging between $400 million and $650 million. The sale occurred after Facebook had reportedly ended negotiations with the company in 2013. Following the acquisition the entity was renamed Google DeepMind and kept that name for approximately two years before merging with Google Brain in April 2023.
Game Playing Breakthroughs
In October 2015 AlphaGo defeated European Go champion Fan Hui five games to zero marking the first time an AI beat a professional Go player. This achievement stunned experts because computers previously only played at amateur levels due to the game's vast complexity. By March 2016 the system won four games against Lee Sedol a nine-dan professional in a five-game match. The technology relied on deep reinforcement learning using policy networks to evaluate move probabilities and value networks to assess positions. In 2017 AlphaGo Zero defeated the original AlphaGo in one hundred out of one hundred self-played games without any human data input. Later that year AlphaZero gained superhuman abilities at chess and shogi after playing millions of games against itself. MuZero released in 2019 mastered domains including Go, chess, shogi, and Atari 2600 games without needing known rules or human data. AlphaStar introduced in January 2019 reached Grandmaster level on the StarCraft II ladder by October 2019 becoming the first AI to top a widely popular esport league. Researchers applied these same principles to solve real-world challenges like video compression achieving a 6.28% average reduction in bitrate for platforms such as YouTube.