Technology

Posted on December 6, 2019 by staff

DeepMind co-founder joins Google full-time

Technology

A co-founder of Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind has joined the tech giant full-time.

Mustafa Suleyman has been taking time off from London-headquartered DeepMind and will “work on opportunities and impacts of applied AI technologies” at Google from January.

His DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis praised his role in building up the AI firm.

“As a serial entrepreneur, Mustafa played a key role over the past decade, helping to get DeepMind off the ground, and launched a series of innovative collaborations with Google to reduce energy consumption in data centres, improve Android battery performance, optimise Google Play, and find ways to improve the lives of patients, nurses and doctors alike,” he wrote in a blog post.

“Mustafa leaves DeepMind having helped set us up for long-term success, and I’m looking forward to what he’ll achieve in the years ahead as he joins Google in a new role.”

DeepMind Technologies was founded in the UK in 2011 by Mustafa Suleyman, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg and bought and renamed by Google in 2014.

Its first two NHS partnerships – a monitoring app which seeks to detect early signs of acute kidney injury and machine learning project which looks for early signs of eye diseases – were controversial.

The relationship came under the microscope when it was revealed that DeepMind has access to millions of NHS patient records for the kidney project, an app known as Streams.

It responded by organising four ‘patient engagement forums’ a year at Google’s new London office in King’s Cross, with the aim of achieving greater transparency.

In November 2018 DeepMind’s health division transferred to Google Health UK, with the consent of the five NHS Trusts which had signed data-sharing agreements with DeepMind.

On his new role, Suleyman tweeted: “After a wonderful decade at DeepMind, I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be joining… the fantastic team at Google to work on opportunities and impacts of applied AI technologies. Can’t wait to get going!”

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