Shane Legg

Last updated

Shane Legg
CBE
Born1973or1974(age 49–50)
Alma mater
Known for DeepMind Technologies
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis Machine Super Intelligence
 (2008)
Doctoral advisor Marcus Hutter

Shane Legg CBE (born 1973or1974 [1] ) is a machine learning researcher and entrepreneur. With Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, he cofounded DeepMind Technologies (later bought by Google and now called Google DeepMind), and works there as the chief AGI scientist. [2] [3] He is also known for his academic work on artificial general intelligence, including his thesis supervised by Marcus Hutter. [4]

Contents

Early life and education

Legg attended Rotorua Lakes High School in Rotorua, on New Zealand's North Island. [5] He completed his undergraduate studies at Waikato University in 1996. [6] Also in 1996, he obtained his MSc degree with a thesis entitled "Solomonoff Induction", with Cristian S. Calude at the University of Auckland. [7] [8]

Research interests

In the early 2000s, Legg re-introduced and popularized with Ben Goertzel the term "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), to describe an AI that can do practically any cognitive task a human can do. [9] He said that at this time, talking about AGI "would put you on the lunatic fringe". [4]

Legg is known for his concern of existential risk from AI, highlighted in 2011 in an interview on LessWrong [3] [10] and in 2023 he signed the statement on AI risk of extinction. [11] [12]

Career

Before his PhD and before cofounding DeepMind, Shane Legg worked at "a number of software development positions at private companies", including the "big data firm Adaptive Intelligence" [13] and the startup WebMind founded by Ben Goertzel. [4]

Research

Legg later obtained a PhD at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA), a joint research institute of USI Università della Svizzera italiana and SUPSI. [13] [14] He worked on theoretical models of super intelligent machines (AIXI) with Marcus Hutter, and completed in 2008 his doctoral thesis entitled "Machine Super Intelligence". [4] [15] He then went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in finance at USI, [13] and began a further fellowship at University College London's Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit. [13]

DeepMind

Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg first met in 2009 at University College London, where Legg was a postdoctoral researcher. [16]

In 2010, Legg cofounded the start-up DeepMind Technologies along with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. DeepMind Technologies was bought in 2014 by Google. [17] [18] After the merge with Google Brain in 2023, the company is now known as Google DeepMind. [19]

According to a 2017 article, a significant part of his job as the chief scientist was to supervise recruitment, decide where DeepMind should focus its efforts, and to lead DeepMind's AI safety work. [3]

As of July 2023, Legg works at Google DeepMind as the Chief AGI Scientist. [2]

Awards and honors

Legg was awarded the $10,000 prize of the Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence for his PhD done in 2008. [15]

Legg was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to the science and technology sector and to investment. [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jürgen Schmidhuber</span> German computer scientist

Jürgen Schmidhuber is a German computer scientist noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically artificial neural networks. He is a scientific director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Switzerland. He is also director of the Artificial Intelligence Initiative and professor of the Computer Science program in the Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) division at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geoffrey Hinton</span> British-Canadian computer scientist and psychologist (born 1947)

Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In 2017, he co-founded and became the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This is in contrast to narrow AI, which is designed for specific tasks. AGI is considered one of various definitions of strong AI.

Bill Hibbard is a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Space Science and Engineering Center working on visualization and machine intelligence. He is principal author of the Vis5D, Cave5D, and VisAD open-source visualization systems. Vis5D was the first system to produce fully interactive animated 3D displays of time-dynamic volumetric data sets and the first open-source 3D visualization system.

A cognitive architecture refers to both a theory about the structure of the human mind and to a computational instantiation of such a theory used in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science. These formalized models can be used to further refine comprehensive theories of cognition and serve as the frameworks for useful artificial intelligence programs. Successful cognitive architectures include ACT-R and SOAR. The research on cognitive architectures as software instantiation of cognitive theories was initiated by Allen Newell in 1990.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Demis Hassabis</span> British entrepreneur and artificial intelligence researcher (born 1976)

Sir Demis Hassabis is a British computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. In his early career he was a video game AI programmer and designer, and an expert board games player. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Advisor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research</span> Public research institute

The Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a research institution based in Lugano, in Canton Ticino in southern Switzerland. It was founded in 1988 by Angelo Dalle Molle through the private Fondation Dalle Molle. In 2000 it became a public research institute, affiliated with the Università della Svizzera italiana and SUPSI in Ticino, Switzerland. In 1997 it was listed among the top ten artificial intelligence laboratories, and among the top four in the field of biologically-inspired AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Goertzel</span> American computer scientist and AI researcher

Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and businessman. He helped popularize the term 'artificial general intelligence'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenCog</span> Project for an open source artificial intelligence framework

OpenCog is a project that aims to build an open source artificial intelligence framework. OpenCog Prime is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an emergent phenomenon of the whole system. OpenCog Prime's design is primarily the work of Ben Goertzel while the OpenCog framework is intended as a generic framework for broad-based AGI research. Research utilizing OpenCog has been published in journals and presented at conferences and workshops including the annual Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. OpenCog is released under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conference on Artificial General Intelligence</span> Annual meeting of researchers of Artificial General Intelligence

The Conference on Artificial General Intelligence is a meeting of researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence organized by the AGI Society, steered by Marcus Hutter and Ben Goertzel. It has been held annually since 2008. The conference was initiated by the 2006 Bethesda Artificial General Intelligence Workshop and has been hosted at the University of Memphis ; Arlington, Virginia ; Lugano, Switzerland ; Google headquarters in Mountain View, California ; the University of Oxford, United Kingdom ; and at Peking University, Beijing, China, Quebec City, Canada. The AGI-23 conference was held in Stockholm, Sweden.

Google DeepMind Technologies Limited is a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Google. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014 and merged with Google AI's Google Brain division to become Google DeepMind in April 2023. The company is based in London, with research centres in Canada, France, Germany, and the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mustafa Suleyman</span> British entrepreneur and activist

Mustafa Suleyman is a British artificial intelligence (AI) entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Microsoft AI, and the co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, an AI company acquired by Google. After leaving DeepMind, he co-founded Inflection AI, a machine learning and generative AI company, in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Future of Life Institute</span> International nonprofit research institute

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit organization which aims to steer transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from large-scale risks, with a focus on existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence (AI). FLI's work includes grantmaking, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, United States government, and European Union institutions.

Pushmeet Kohli is highly regarded Computer and Machine Learning scientist and at Google DeepMind where he holds the position of Vice President of research for the "Secure and Reliable AI" and "AI for Science and Sustainability". Before joining DeepMind, he was partner scientist and director of research at Microsoft Research and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. Kohli's research investigates applications of machine learning and computer vision. He has also made contributions in game theory, discrete algorithms and psychometrics.

AlphaGo is a computer program that plays the board game Go. It was developed by the London-based DeepMind Technologies, an acquired subsidiary of Google. Subsequent versions of AlphaGo became increasingly powerful, including a version that competed under the name Master. After retiring from competitive play, AlphaGo Master was succeeded by an even more powerful version known as AlphaGo Zero, which was completely self-taught without learning from human games. AlphaGo Zero was then generalized into a program known as AlphaZero, which played additional games, including chess and shogi. AlphaZero has in turn been succeeded by a program known as MuZero which learns without being taught the rules.

David Silver is a principal research scientist at Google DeepMind and a professor at University College London. He has led research on reinforcement learning with AlphaGo, AlphaZero and co-lead on AlphaStar.

AlphaStar is a computer program by DeepMind that plays the video game StarCraft II. It was unveiled to the public by name in January 2019. In a significant milestone for artificial intelligence, AlphaStar attained Grandmaster status in August 2019.

Isomorphic Labs Limited is a London-based company which uses artificial intelligence for drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs was founded by Demis Hassabis, who also serves the CEO. The company was incorporated on February 4, 2021 and announced on November 5, 2021. It was established under Alphabet Inc. as a spin-off from its AI research lab DeepMind, of which Hassabis is also founder and CEO.

Linda Christina van der Gaag is a Dutch computer scientist whose research concerns artificial intelligence for medical decision support systems, including graphical models, Bayesian networks, and expert systems. She is SUPSI Professor at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Switzerland.

Jan Leike is an AI alignment researcher who has worked at DeepMind and OpenAI. He joined Anthropic in May 2024.

References

  1. Henshall, Will (7 September 2023). "TIME100 AI 2023: Shane Legg". Time. Retrieved 1 December 2023.
  2. 1 2 "About". www.deepmind.com. Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 Shead, Sam. "DeepMind's elusive third cofounder is the man making sure that machines stay on our side". Insider. Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Artificial general intelligence: Are we close, and does it even make sense to try?". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  5. Ryan, Holly (10 January 2016). "Soaring Kiwis: Programmed Early for Success". The New Zealand Herald . Retrieved 15 January 2016.
  6. "Dr Shane Legg, Distinguished Alumni Award and Public Lecture".
  7. "Research Groups − CDMTCS − Research − Groups − CDMTCS − Docs". www.cs.auckland.ac.nz. Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  8. Legg, Shane (March 1997). Solomonoff Induction (Thesis). Auckland, New Zealand: Dept. of Mathematics, University of Auckland.
  9. "Who coined the term "AGI"? – goertzel.org" . Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  10. "Q&A with Shane Legg on risks from AI". LessWrong. 17 June 2011.
  11. "Statement on AI Risk | CAIS". www.safe.ai. Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  12. McKee, Jake (30 May 2023). "AI creators fear the extinction of humanity". inews.co.uk. Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  13. 1 2 3 4 Shead, Sam (26 January 2017). "DeepMind's Elusive Third Cofounder is the Man Making Sure that Machines Stay on our Side". Insider.com. Retrieved 4 August 2022. Before DeepMind, Legg spent several years in academia, completing a Post Doc in finance at the University of Lugano in Switzerland and a PhD at Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA). He also held a research associate position at University College London's Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and a number of software development positions at private companies like big data firm Adaptive Intelligence.
  14. IDSIA Staff (4 August 2022). "Institute: Our Institute—A Short Description of IDSIA". IDSIA.ch. Retrieved 4 August 2022. [IDSIA] is a not-for-profit research institute for artificial intelligence. It is a joint institute of both the Faculty of Informatics of the Università della Svizzera Italiana and the Department of Innovative Technologies of SUPSI, the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland.
  15. 1 2 "Seminar: Dr Shane Legg, "What can the architecture of the brain teach…". Oxford Martin School. Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  16. "TIME100 AI 2023: Shane Legg". Time. 7 September 2023. Retrieved 9 September 2023.
  17. "Google Buys U.K. Artificial Intelligence Company DeepMind". Bloomberg. 27 January 2014. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
  18. "Google makes £400m move in quest for artificial intelligence". Financial Times. 27 January 2014. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
  19. "Google consolidates AI research labs into Google DeepMind to compete with OpenAI". VentureBeat. 20 April 2023. Retrieved 28 July 2023.
  20. "Birthday Honours 2019: the Prime Minister's list (CSV) − GOV.UK". assets.publishing.service.gov.uk. Retrieved 28 July 2023.