Demis Hassabis started playing chess at age four and soon blossomed into a child prodigy. At age eight, success on the chessboard led him to ponder two questions that have obsessed him ever since: first, how does the brain learn to master complex tasks; and second, could computers ever do the same? Now 38, Hassabis puzzles over those questions for Google, having sold his little-known London-based startup, DeepMind, to the search company earlier this year for a reported 400 million pounds ($650 million at the time). Google snapped up DeepMind shortly after it demonstrated software capable of teaching itself to play classic video games to a super-human level (see "Is Google Cornering the Market on Deep Learning?"). At the TED conference in Vancouver this year, Google CEO Larry Page gushed about Hassabis and called his company's technology "one of the most exciting things I've seen in a long time."

In 2016, we saw a wide range of breakthroughs having to do with artificial intelligence and deep learning in particular. Google, Facebook, and Baidu announced several breakthroughs using deep learning. Deep learning is one specific class of machine learning algorithms. It has a long history, taking its roots in the earlier days of computer science. However, not all of machine learning is deep learning.

Demis Hassabis started playing chess at age four and soon blossomed into a child prodigy. At age eight, success on the chessboard led him to ponder two questions that have obsessed him ever since: first, how does the brain learn to master complex tasks; and second, could computers ever do the same? Now 38, Hassabis puzzles over those questions for Google, having sold his little-known London-based startup, DeepMind, to the search company earlier this year for a reported 400 million pounds ($650 million at the time). Google snapped up DeepMind shortly after it demonstrated software capable of teaching itself to play classic video games to a super-human level (see "Is Google Cornering the Market on Deep Learning?"). At the TED conference in Vancouver this year, Google CEO Larry Page gushed about Hassabis and called his company's technology "one of the most exciting things I've seen in a long time."

The following is a condensed and edited interview with Demis Hassabis, CEO, DeepMind Technologies. Our stated mission is to solve intelligence, and we use the word "solve," because it can mean a few things. It means to understand intelligence, fundamentally understand it, and re-create it artificially. If you look at how civilization has been built and everything humans have achieved, it's down to our intelligence. It's our minds that have set us apart.

It doesn't look like a place to make groundbreaking discoveries that change the trajectory of society. But in these simulated, claustrophobic corridors, Demis Hassabis thinks he can lay the foundations for software that's smart enough to solve humanity's biggest problems. "Our goal's very big," says Hassabis, whose level-headed manner can mask the audacity of his ideas. He leads a team of roughly 200 computer scientists and neuroscientists at Google's DeepMind, the London-based group behind the AlphaGo software that defeated the world champion at Go in a five-game series earlier this month, setting a milestone in computing. It's supposed to be just an early checkpoint in an effort Hassabis describes as the Apollo program of artificial intelligence, aimed at "solving intelligence, and then using that to solve everything else."