DeepMind co-founder returns
It was at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit where he met Demis Hassabis, who introduced him to Mustafa Suleyman, and DeepMind was formed shortly after from a shared passion and grand plans.
‘‘We were believers that great things were going to happen in this area in the coming years,’’ Legg said.
‘‘When we started DeepMind, we had grand plans. We really believed that machine learning and artificial intelligence were certainly going to take off, and if that did happen, we’d be able to grow DeepMind into quite a large organisation.
‘‘You still have to pinch yourself when you see the reality of it.’’
Despite being at the forefront of artificial intelligence for some time, Legg said he was still regularly in awe by what machines were able to achieve.
When DeepMind program AlphaGo challenged 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol to a five-game match, AlphaGo won all but the fourth game.
DeepMind states that their system learns from experience, and the Go victory was seen as being far ahead of its time.
‘‘The Go results were amazing, it was incredible to watch that unfold,’’ Legg said.
‘‘We knew we had a powerful Go player and we were confident we would win most of the games, but we also knew it wasn’t perfect.
‘‘It was a good result but I can tell you we were really on-edge.’’
Among the many areas Google DeepMind is prevalent in, Legg said they were working towards developing a program that could conquer StarCraft, a real-time strategy game that no form of artificial intelligence has learned to play at a high level.
But even New Zealand’s most influential global Kiwi in the technology field said there’s no way of knowing what the future holds for artificial intellegence.
’’Nobody knows what it’s going to look like in another 10-20 years.
‘‘I am quite confident, talking to people in hardware, that at least for the next few years, the performance of microprocesses, the amount of information they can process, the amount of mathematical calculations they can perform in a second, will keep growing very rapidly for a few years,’’ he said.
‘‘After that, it’s anybody’s guess what will happen.’’