Few companies can boast of having hired researchers who have become Nobel Prize winners. Still far from the historic IBM (six Nobels) or Bell Labs (ten Nobels), Google DeepMind is one of them, and even doubly so, since two of these prestigious distinctions were awarded, on Tuesday, October 8 and Wednesday, October 9 , to three scientists. included in their ranks: Geoffrey Hinton in physics, then Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. This positive publicity stunt also illustrates the weight that the digital giant has in research on artificial intelligence (AI).
Born in 1998 as an online search engine, Google today benefits from having invested in AI from the beginning. In a very competitive sector with the arrival of newcomers such as OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, the company periodically recalls having used, since 2001, “machine learning” to create a spell checker for user queries in your engine.
Google is also, rightly, proud to have published some emblematic research articles in the sector, including the Transformer architecture, published in 2017, on which the main language models that have become famous among the general public in these years are based. two years with him. launch of conversational robots such as ChatGPT or Gemini, its internal counterpart.
Poaching by Silicon Valley companies
The two Nobel Prizes also reflect the financial and tactical power of the digital giants, which have acquired key positions in AI thanks to their strength in their original services, such as online search or social networks. In fact, the British Geoffrey Hinton was initially an academic awarded the Turing Prize (a kind of Nobel Prize for AI) for his work on neural networks at the University of Toronto (Canada). He was attracted to Google in 2013, the same year his French co-recipient, Yann Le Cun, joined Facebook (future Meta). The poaching by the large Silicon Valley companies of two of the three “godfathers of AI” It had hit people’s minds. Only Yoshua Bengio remained full-time at the University of Montreal; Hinton left Google in 2023, at age 76.
DeepMind was a start-up created in London in 2010. Google bought it in 2014 for $625 million, bringing in Demis Hassabis and its other two co-founders. Quite independent and focused on fundamental research, DeepMind merged, in 2023, with Google’s team of AI researchers called “brain.” Pushed to the head of the group, Hassabis created Isomorphic Labs, a subsidiary dedicated to the commercialization of Nobel Prize-winning protein modeling research in the healthcare field. The awards received this week risk fueling fears that AI is dominated by digital giants.
