DeepMind, the British firm that created AlphaGo, has become the brightest star in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), when entrepreneurs around the world thought the most cutting-edge technological innovations were coming from Silicon Valley.

DemisHassabis is the “superhero” behind AlphaGo.

The AI star, who is a quarter Chinese, came to China for the first time in May. He was always surrounded by staff as he walked around the conference room in Wuzhen, shaking hands, taking photos and signing autographs. In between, he gave a talk on what AlphaGo really is.

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As he walked into a makeshift interview room set up by CBN, he casually struck up a conversation with Zhou Jiangong, CBN’s chief executive, about Go, AlphaGo and the seemingly mysterious DeepMind.

At 40, balding, he looks like a normal Chinese college teacher. But when he talks about his mission to “make AI the ‘ultimate tool’ for exploring the universe,” no one doubts he is serious.

He has been called “one of the smartest humans on the planet” by Internet inventor TimBernersLee and hailed by the British media as a “superhero” in the age of artificial intelligence.

DeepMind, which he founded, was acquired by Google for $600m in 2014 and has since shaped Google’s direction for the next decade, shifting its strategy from mobile-first to AI-first.

The two things he is most excited about in AI are deep learning and reinforcement learning, and AlphaGo is a combination of the two and an important step towards the goal of universal AI. “Solve intelligence now,” Hassabis says, “and then use intelligence to solve everything.”

From child prodigy to AlphaGo

On May 27, the final game of the man-machine war, AlphaGo and the current world number one young Chinese go master Ke Jie, the final score of 3-0.

Half an hour later, Hassabis and Ke stood on the stage shaking hands and embracing each other. The applause from the audience continued for a long time.

“Maybe that’s where genius meets genius.” A scene of the staff sigh way.

Hassabis is a young genius. He enjoys all kinds of mind games. He started playing chess at the age of 4 and became a grand master at the age of 13. He still holds the world record for winning the “Mind Olympics” elite competition five times.

At the age of 11, hassabis went to Liechtenstein to play one tournament after another on the international tour, which made an impression on him as a teenager.

He was playing a Danish champion, and at the end of 10 hours Hassabis was left with the king and queen, the other side with the king, che and elephant, and had the advantage. The match could have ended in a draw, but Hassabis was tired and chose to throw in the towel.

Hasa than memories in a show on the BBC, the game let him bring forth an Epiphany – “are we wasting brain, since the levels of the game players are top, why not use our brain to do more meaningful things, such as solving the problem of cancer, to find the cure of other diseases, not better?”

At the time, Hassabis was ranked no. 2 in the world among his age group, and almost everyone around him took it for granted that this would be his future career. But instead of becoming a professional player, Hassabis became interested in computers.

At school, a few friends and Hassabis formed hacker clubs to write code, make video presentations, copy movies or games they had watched, and spend all their spare time programming better with the computers.

At the age of 20, Mr Hassabis earned a degree in computer science from Cambridge University before launching Elixir, a video game company. He commented that successful games reflect life from one side and learn a lot from it. “Life does not allow us to pursue stability all the time. We need to constantly stimulate us to generate new ideas, improve strategies and develop our own brain, and games are like brain gymnastics.”

Hassabis has since opted to return to academia, completing a PhD in neuroscience at university college London, completing academic research into the hippocampus and memory, and founding the DeepMind team in 2011 with fellow ai expert ShaneLegg and serial entrepreneur MustafaSuleyman.

As an “exceptional” genius, Mr Hassabis had his own “biological clock” : he started work at 10am, spent the whole day in DeepMind’s offices, went back to dinner with his family, started the next day at 10pm and did not go to bed until 4am. Usually, he spends a few hours at night researching, reading the latest academic papers and thinking creatively.

When Google bought DeepMind for $600 million in 2014, its biggest acquisition in Europe at the time, the company had no publicly released products and only had 20 technical staff.

With Google’s blessing, DeepMind accelerated AlphaGo’s development. Until Last March, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the former world no. 1 go player, 4-1, in what was seen as a historic breakthrough in the development of ARTIFICIAL intelligence.

In academia, too, DeepMind proved its worth: in February 2015 it published a paper in nature, a scientific journal, describing human beings who could learn to become masters of atari, the ancestor of modern consoles. In January last year, DeepMind published another paper claiming that its new algorithm, AlphaGo, had made a huge breakthrough in go. In addition to running DeepMind, Mr Hassabis has simultaneously published four papers at the world’s top scientific conferences.

These rich experiences may have something to do with Hassabis’ family education. “I have a very diverse background.” Hasa, in an exclusive interview, the first finance and economics, his father has a Greek and Cypriot descent, when young, he was a singer-songwriter, while mother was born from a Chinese from Singapore, they all like to do things according to his be fond of, this to his influence is – “don’t conform, walk yourself’s road, and always go on, that is the correct way of life.”

Give smart people a chance

At a TED conference, LarryPage, then Google’s CEO, gushed about hassabis and called DeepMind “one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a long time.”

The success of DeepMind, led by Hassabis, has apparently convinced Google that it is time to make AI a priority for the company.

“We’re excited to prove that cutting edge technology doesn’t just exist in Silicon Valley. I’m proud to be British and to carry the flag of British innovation.” Hassabis told China Business Network.

In his view, Britain has a long tradition of innovation in computer technology and artificial intelligence, such as Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee, the “father of the Internet”. It’s just that people may not be so good at turning technology into business success.

“There are places where cutting-edge research can be done, like London and China, so why not? If you have enough smart people and you give them a chance.” Hassabis said.

Behind Hassabis and DeepMind is a group of the brightest minds in more than 60 countries tackling the most interesting challenges in AI.

DeepMind currently has 400 to 500 employees in London, he told China Business News. Among them are more than 200 top doctors and scientists.

“The top people always want to work with the other top people in the world,” Laughs Hassabis. Especially when you start making products like AlphaGo, or publishing research in Nature, it’s advertising to the best talent in the world, “If they want to make great products like AlphaGo, DeepMind is a good place to work.”

On the other hand, these top talent often want to work on the most interesting problems and take on the most interesting and intelligent challenges. Hassabis believes that solving ai problems is one of the most interesting things you can do, so the research challenges are also interesting for the most intelligent people.

A third reason is the unique research culture DeepMind has created. It is a hybrid of academic laboratories and start-up models, trying to combine the best of both sides.

Mr Hassabis says this mixed culture touches everything DeepMind does, including the interview process, the management process, the project management… All of these are specifically designed to facilitate research to yield results as quickly as possible. Doing research in an academic lab, for example, is often less likely to have the energy and fast pace of working at a start-up; The problem startups often have is not being ambitious enough and not being ambitious enough to do the research they want to do, and DeepMind is trying to bring those two things together.

The advantage of this talent internationalization is that talents with different cultural backgrounds and different ways of thinking come with it. “I think it’s very helpful for research projects, because taking as many dimensions as possible helps you find objective directions.”

DeepMind is full of PHDS and top diplomas from top universities, so to speak. But if college dropout Steve Jobs had lived in the age of artificial intelligence, would he have succeeded?

Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.

Mr Hassabis’s answer to that question is: probably.

“You’re right, most of the people here have top degrees, but some of them don’t. They’re self-taught, especially in engineering, and they’ve made great contributions.” Hassabis believes that it varies from person to person, and that “an extraordinary person like Steve Jobs succeeds in whatever he tries to do.”