CREDIBILITY BOOST FOR DEMIS HASSABIS AT ALPHABET
But that humanitarian agenda faded to the background after the sale to Google and especially after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which sparked a race among tech giants to deploy chatbot-style technology to businesses and consumers.
DeepMind has since become more product-focused (information about its healthcare and climate efforts disappeared from its homepage, for example), though it has continued with health-related efforts like AlphaFold. Out of DeepMind’s roughly 1,500-strong workforce, a team of just two dozen people were running the protein-folding project when it reached a critical milestone in 2020, according to a video documentary about the effort.
The Nobel will surely give Hassabis a credibility boost at Alphabet, where he has been leading the company’s fraught efforts to keep up with OpenAI. Google’s flagship AI model Gemini has grappled with controversies over its frequent mistakes and the possibility it will choke off traffic to the rest of the web.
Now perhaps a smoother path has been paved for Hassabis if he wants to become Alphabet’s next chief executive.
The former chess champion is a consummate strategist and rivals Sam Altman as the world’s most successful builder of AI technology, having pushed the boundaries of fields like deep learning, reinforcement learning and games-based models such as AlphaGo, which beat world champion Go players eight years ago. Hassabis was already talking about taking on protein folding during those matches.
