Demis Hassabis: 'Learning from first principles'

Demis Hassabis is co-founder and CEO of DeepMind and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In May 2017 DeepMind's AlphaGo convincingly beat the top ranked human player Ke Jie 3-0 in a match watched across the world. Up until DeepMind, Go had been previously viewed as a considerable challenge for AI, with a search space orders of magnitude larger than chess and no easy method known for positional evaluation. DeepMind's approach combined deep learning over many human games, with advances to convolutional networks, monte-carlo search and eventually self-play. Deepmind has pioneered research in deep learning and is focussed on applications of intelligence that will be beneficial to humanity.