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Google DeepMind enters a new era as co-founder Demis Hassabis shifts AI role

The Guardian

When Sir Demis Hassabis said AI had brought the world to a "pivotal moment in human history" last month, he knew another big change was imminent. This shift was closer to home. The Nobel prize-winning head of Google DeepMind, Google's AI unit, announced this week he was relinquishing his day-to-day duties as chief executive and becoming chair. He is also taking on the role of chief scientist at DeepMind's parent, Alphabet. Hassabis and DeepMind have been key players in AI's breakthrough era.


Inside Google DeepMind's Reshuffle After CEO Demis Hassabis Steps Aside

TIME - Tech

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Google AI veterans depart during seismic leadership shift

The Japan Times

Demis Hassabis, chief executive officer of Google DeepMind, attends a memorandum of understanding signing ceremony in Seoul on April 27. Alphabet Inc.'s Google is losing some of its most prominent artificial intelligence veterans in a seismic overhaul that is casting doubt over leadership in a critical area of growth right as competition intensifies. Alphabet shares fell 4% on the news. Jeff Dean, a longtime Google employee central to the development of the company's AI strategy, is departing to launch a startup, taking several high-profile colleagues with him. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, is moving into a chairman role at the lab.


'There's this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?': the philosopher inside Google DeepMind

The Guardian

'There's this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?': the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate - and think through - the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference? In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one. Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls "enthusiastic" rock climbing. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John's College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of "yuppie ethics" and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn't there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon. DeepMind, meanwhile, was the world's leading AI research lab. In part, this was because it had the financial and computational backing of Google, which had bought the company in 2014 for $650m. In part, it was because DeepMind had recently shown it could put those resources to stunning use. In Seoul, in 2016, a DeepMind system called AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go champion, in a five-game match. The victory was significant not least because of Go's legendary complexity; the game has more possible configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Thanks to the fuss around AlphaGo, Gabriel was aware of DeepMind.


The Download: a reality check for geoengineering and the science of interoception

MIT Technology Review

Plus: SpaceX is now valued higher than Amazon. Solar geoengineering, the controversial idea that we could deliberately intervene in the climate system to counteract global warming, is moving beyond computer simulations and into the practical engineering challenges required to make it real. Researchers are now working on aircraft, materials, and other systems for solar geoengineering. But as they delve into these details, they're finding that even early deployment would require significant new infrastructure, time, and investment. Find out what happens when solar geoengineering encounters the realities of trying to cool the planet . Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception.


Demis Hassabis Thinks AI Job Cuts Are Dumb

WIRED

The CEO of Google DeepMind tells WIRED that companies should use the productivity gains of AI to do more, not lay people off. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, is keen to talk about the coding skills of his company's newest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. The model has been trained to perform complex agentic coding tasks: translate large code bases from one language to another; find and fix bugs lurking deep in knotty code; and even write entire operating systems from scratch. Hassabis does not, however, think this spells doom for software developers. "I have no idea why people are going around talking with certainty about that," Hassabis tells WIRED ahead of the new model reveal at today's Google's I/O event .


The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby review โ€“ the story of the man who changed the world

The Guardian

I t was March 2016, and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the world was gathered to watch the culmination of a battle 2,500 years in the making. On one side was the South Korean Lee Se-dol, the second-highest ranking Go player in the world. On the other was AlphaGo - a computer program developed by London-based artificial intelligence research company DeepMind. "Chess is the greatest game mankind has invented," game designer Alex Randolph once said. "Go is the greatest game mankind has discovered."




Better Transfer Learning with Inferred Successor Maps

Neural Information Processing Systems

Dayan's SR [3] is well-suited for transfer learning in settings with fixed dynamics, as the decomposition ofthevaluefunction intorepresentations ofexpected outcomes (future stateoccupancies) andcorresponding rewards allowsustoquickly recompute values under newrewardsettings.