The Deep Mind of Dennis Hassabis

In the race to recruit the best AI talent, Google scored a coup by getting the team led by a former video game guru and chess prodigy

https://medium.com/backchannel/the-deep-mind-of-demis-hassabis-156112890d8a

the only path to developing really powerful AI would be to use this unstructured information. It’s also called unsupervised learning— you just give it data and it learns by itself what to do with it, what the structure is, what the insights are.

One of the people you work with at Google is Geoff Hinton, a pioneer of neural networks. Has his work been crucial to yours?

Sure. He had this big paper in 2006 that rejuvenated this whole area. And he introduced this idea of deep neural networks—Deep Learning. The other big thing that we have here is reinforcement learning, which we think is equally important. A lot of what Deep Mind has done so far is combining those two promising areas of research together in a really fundamental way. And that’s resulted in the Atari game player, which really is the first demonstration of an agent that goes from pixels to action, as we call it.