DeepMind researcher says AI agents should cooperate for social good

Breakthroughs in technology are typically attributed to a single lone genius, but research led by DeepMind scientist Thore Graepel suggests the full power of AI will be unleashed through a collective approach of multi-agents. The UCL machine learning professor helped create AlphaGo, which pursued an individual strategy called competitive self-play to become the first computer program to defeat a human professional Go player in 2015. He's since turned his focus from competition to cooperation, using deep reinforcement learning to understand how teamwork develops among self-interested agents, whether they're computer programmes or human social dilemmas. "We believe that this kind of model is a powerful baseline to study these kinds of social dilemmas in more detail," said Graepel at the AI for Social Good symposium at the Turing Institute. His work forms part of DeepMind's ambitious mission "to solve intelligence".