Dr. Shane Legg BCMS, MSc, PhD, CBE
Email: contact@vetta.org
Bio
I grew up in Rotorua, New Zealand before moving to the University of Waikato in Hamilton for my Bachelor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences (BCMS). My first experience of machine learning research was as an undergraduate working summers in the WEKA project. In 1996 I did an MSc in mathematics at the University of Auckland supervised by Prof. Cris Calude. My masters thesis was a reworking of the Solomonoff Induction convergence proofs.
After a few years as a software engineer in Auckland I ended up working for the AI startup Webmind in New York and then for A2I2 in Los Angeles. In early 2002 I suggested “Artificial General Intelligence” as the title for a new book on general AI systems. The term AGI then started to be used in various online forms and is now in common use.
In 2003 I started a PhD at IDSIA in Switzerland working on AIXI, a theoretical model of super intelligence developed by Prof. Marcus Hutter. My PhD thesis was awarded the $10,000 Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Prize.
My post-doctoral were at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, supervised by Prof. Peter Dayan. There I met Demis Hassabis and found that we shared a passion for AGI. Along with Mustafa Suleyman, we started DeepMind in 2010 with the explicit mission to “build the world’s first artificial general intelligence”.
DeepMind was sold to Google in 2014. It has now grown into a large AI research and engineering group within Google that develops a wide range of AI systems, including Gemini. I am Google DeepMind’s Chief AGI Scientist, I co-chair the AGI Safety Council and I also run a team studying what the post-AGI world could be like.