DeepMind is founded

DeepMind was registered in London on 23 September 2010 by a chess prodigy turned games designer turned neuroscientist, Demis Hassabis, a machine-learning theorist, Shane Legg, whose doctoral thesis had tried to define intelligence mathematically, and an entrepreneur, Mustafa Suleyman. The stated mission was to solve intelligence and then use it to solve everything else. The method was to be reinforcement learning, which had been out of fashion since TD-Gammon, combined with deep networks and whatever the brain could teach.

It was an unusual company. It had no product, published in journals, and was funded by investors, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk among them, who were buying a research programme. In 2013 its Atari-playing deep Q-network showed that the programme worked; in January 2014 Google bought the company for around £400 million, on the condition that an ethics board be created.

AlphaGo in 2016, AlphaGo Zero in 2017, AlphaFold in 2020 and Gemini from 2023 followed. DeepMind established the template of the frontier laboratory, a company run like a university department and funded like a startup, that OpenAI copied in 2015 and Anthropic in 2021.