Shane Legg

Before his PhD and before cofounding DeepMind, Shane Legg worked at "a number of software development positions at private companies", including the "big data firm Adaptive Intelligence"^[13] and the startup WebMind founded by Ben Goertzel.^[4]

Legg later obtained a PhD at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA), a joint research institute of USI Università della Svizzera italiana and SUPSI.^[13][14] He worked on theoretical models of super intelligent machines (AIXI) with Marcus Hutter, and completed in 2008 his doctoral thesis entitled "Machine Super Intelligence".^[4][15] He then went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in finance at USI,^[13] and began a further fellowship at University College London's Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit.^[13]

Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg first met in 2009 at University College London, where Legg was a postdoctoral researcher.^[16]

In 2010, Legg cofounded the start-up DeepMind Technologies along with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. DeepMind Technologies was bought in 2014 by Google.^[17][18] After the merge with Google Brain in 2023, the company is now known as Google DeepMind.^[19]

According to a 2017 article, a significant part of his job as the chief scientist was to supervise recruitment, to decide where DeepMind should focus its efforts, and to lead DeepMind's AI safety work.^[3]

As of July 2023^[update], Legg works at Google DeepMind as the Chief AGI Scientist.^[2]

Legg was awarded the $10,000 prize of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence for his PhD done in 2008.^[15]

Legg was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to the science and technology sector and to investment.^[20]