Deepmind is a leading artificial intelligence company. Founded in 2010, Deepmind Technologies Limited is a private technology firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom. The company operates on an international level with offices in Canada, France, and the United States. As of 2016, Deepmind had over 700 employees.
DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for $400 million. The company has been described as ambitious, and its technology as world-leading. In 2015, it was revealed that Google had granted DeepMind access to vast amounts of health data from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). This caused significant concern among patients’ groups and privacy advocates. However, DeepMind has stated that it will only use this data for “direct care” purposes such as improving patient outcomes or developing new products and services.
The company’s goal is to “solve intelligence”, and it see artificial general intelligence (AGI) as the key to this. AGI is AI that can understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can – including but not limited to problem solving, natural communication and reasoning. Currently, no AI system possesses AGI but there is active research being conducted into this area by many different organisations around the world.
In 2016, DeepMind founded an ethical board called the Ethics & Society Board which advises on potential issues arising from its work in artificial intelligence development..