Google DeepMind brings together two of the world’s leading AI labs — Google Brain and DeepMind — into a single, focused team led by our CEO Demis Hassabis. Over the last decade, the two teams were responsible for some of the biggest research breakthroughs in AI, many of which underpin the flourishing AI industry we see today.

DeepMind started in 2010, with an interdisciplinary approach to building general AI systems. The research lab brought together new ideas and advances in machine learning, neuroscience, engineering, mathematics, simulation and computing infrastructure, along with new ways of organizing scientific endeavors.

The lab achieved early success by pioneering the field of deep reinforcement learning - a combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning - and using games to test its systems. One of its early breakthroughs was a program called DQN, which learned to play 49 different Atari games from scratch just by observing the raw pixels on the screen and being told to maximize the score.

In 2015, DeepMind unveiled AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a Go world champion. Go was a long-standing grand challenge in AI and AlphaGo’s landmark achievement was considered a decade ahead of its time. AlphaGo inspired a new era of AI systems and its successors, AlphaZero and MuZero, are increasingly general and able to solve many different games as well as complex real-world problems, from compressing YouTube videos to discovering new more efficient computer algorithms.