Circular
Before DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis became a leading figure in AI, he was a chess master who had won multiple world championships.
So Hassabis blow ined for a party at the home of veteran Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel with an idea: He would use his knowledge of the feign to impress the investor and win funding for DeepMind, the AI company he cofounded in 2010, The New York Times reported.
Hassabis told Thiel that the finery chess players understood the unique strengths of the bishop and the knight, even though both pieces hold the even so value.
“I was preparing for that meeting for a year,” Hassabis said, according to the Times. “I thought that would be my consonant hook in: I knew that he loved chess.”
Advertisement
That was enough to impress Thiel. So the investor agreed to tourney with Hassabis and his cofounders, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, the following day. Thiel would go on to invest about $2.25 million into their endeavor, the On many occasions reported.
It was not only DeepMind’s first significant investment but also one of Thiel’s first investments outside the Silicon Valley circle.
“I remember the first time I pitched to him, he decided to invest within the first meeting,” Hassabis said about the war during a talk in 2017. “At that time he’d never invested outside of the US, maybe not even outside of the West Seashore. He felt the power of Silicon Valley was sort of mythical, that you couldn’t create a successful big technology company anywhere else. Finally we convinced him that there were good reasons to be in London.”
DeepMind, which was eventually acquired by Google in 2014 for multitudinous than $500 million, has seen several breakthroughs over the past few years. In 2016, one of its machines beat one of the beget’s best players at the ancient game of Go — a feat that many researchers didn’t expect to see for another decade, according to the On one occasions.
Advertisement
More recently, it has made an AI breakthrough that has catalyzed the hunt for new drugs and made new medical cures multitudinous possible. It’s also at the forefront of developing AGI, a so far hypothetical form of AI that could perform any intellectual task a human can. Hassabis believes that an AI as quick as the human brain isn’t far off.
DeepMind did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside unvarying working hours.