Few companies can boast of employing researchers who have become Nobel Prize winners. Google DeepMind is still far from the historic awards of IBM (six Nobel Prizes) or Bell Labs (ten Nobel Prizes), but it is double, as two of these prestigious honors, Tuesday, October 8 and Wednesday, October 9, were awarded to three scientists. Its ranks included: Geoffrey Hinton in physics, then Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. This positive publicity also demonstrates the weight the digital giant is taking in AI-related research.
Founded in 1998 as an online search engine, Google today benefits from early investment in artificial intelligence. In a highly competitive sector with the arrival of new entrants such as OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, the company regularly recalls that it has been using it since 2001 “machine learning” To create a spell checker for user queries on his engine.
Google is also rightfully proud to have published some notable research articles in the sector, including the Transformer architecture, published in 2017, on which major language models are based that became popular among the general public in those two years The launch of chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, its counterpart Interior.
Poaching by Silicon Valley companies
The two Nobel Prizes also reflect the financial and tactical power of the digital giants, which have gained key positions in artificial intelligence thanks to their strength in their native services, such as online search or social networks. In fact, the British Geoffrey Hinton was initially an academic who won the Turing Award – a kind of Nobel Prize in artificial intelligence – for his work in the field of neural networks at the University of Toronto in Canada. He was drawn to Google in 2013, the same year his French partner, Yann Le Cun, joined Facebook (future Meta). Poaching by big Silicon Valley companies for two of the three companies “Godfathers of Artificial Intelligence” It has struck people's minds. Only Yoshua Bengio remained full-time at the University of Montreal, and Mr. Hinton left Google in 2023, at the age of 76.
DeepMind was a startup founded in London in 2010. Google bought it in 2014 for $625 million, merging Demis Hassabis and his other co-founders. DeepMind has long been completely independent and focused on basic research, and in 2023 merged with a team of AI researchers called “Brain” from Google. Pushing it over everyone's head, Mr. Hassabis notably created Isomorphic Labs, a subsidiary dedicated to commercializing health research on Nobel Prize-winning protein modeling. The awards received this week may raise concerns about the dominance of artificial intelligence by digital giants.
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