Shane Legg is a New Zealand-born researcher and entrepreneur, best known for being one of the co-founders of DeepMind Technologies, alongside Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. Legg has made significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI), with a particular focus on machine learning, theoretical foundations of AI, and understanding intelligence itself.
Before co-founding DeepMind, Shane Legg completed his academic journey with an impressive background in AI and machine learning. He earned his Bachelor's degree from the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Following this, he pursued further studies in Switzerland at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), a renowned research institute in the field of AI. It was here that Legg worked under the supervision of Jürgen Schmidhuber, a prominent figure in the development of neural networks and deep learning technologies. Legg's PhD research focused on machine super intelligence and the theoretical and practical challenges associated with creating highly intelligent machines.
Legg's work has been driven by a deep interest in understanding the principles that underlie intelligent behavior and developing algorithms that can exhibit such behavior. This interest led him to explore various aspects of machine learning and AI, contributing to the field through research on reinforcement learning, a technique that allows machines to learn optimal behaviors through trial and error by maximizing cumulative rewards.
In 2010, Shane Legg's vision for advancing AI research culminated in the founding of DeepMind Technologies, with the goal of creating general-purpose algorithms and advancing the field towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). DeepMind quickly became a leading company in AI research, known for its groundbreaking work in deep learning, neural networks, and reinforcement learning. The company's notable achievements include developing AlphaGo, an AI program that defeated a world champion Go player in 2016, which was a landmark event in the AI community, demonstrating the potential of AI systems to tackle complex problems.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, and since then, the company has continued to make significant advances in AI research, tackling a wide range of challenges from protein folding with AlphaFold to contributing to environmental conservation and healthcare.
Shane Legg's contributions to AI and his role in co-founding DeepMind have positioned him as a key figure in the field, with his work continuing to influence the direction of AI research and its applications across various domains.