The DeepMind Institute aims to advance bold thinking about the safe development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), its beneficial use, and its implications for society. From the lab that pioneered the field, we focus on bringing creative foresight and grounded examination of AI to help tackle the most important questions of our time and navigate humanity’s next era.
We are on the cusp of a profound transformation. Today’s AI systems have impressive capabilities and the rapid pace of innovation suggests we’re now approaching artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all thecognitive capabilitiesof the human brain. While AI can still sometimes fail atbasic tasksand lacks theconsistency and creativityto meet the bar offull AGI, we expect those gaps to be closed soon. We’ve always believed AGI could prove to be theultimate tool for accelerating scientificbreakthroughs. By opening up new paths to understanding and curing disease, developing clean energy and increasing economic prosperity, it could unlock a new golden age of scientific discovery and progress far beyond what we could achieve without it.
Yet there are also challenges and risks that come with the advent of such a transformative technology. We’re already seeing the implications of increasingly capable AI for cybersecurity and biorisks, and there is the potential for loss of control in future self-improving systems. This is a critical moment to ensure we build AGI safely and its benefits to society far outweigh any risks.
We’re launching the DeepMind Institute (DMI) to spur the interdisciplinary research, collaboration and debate required to answer the AGI era's most critical technical and societal questions. What will we value, and how will AGI impact what it means to be human? How do we safely build and govern AGI systems and the communities of agents they will form? Which institutions and policies will society need to adapt to AGI - or reimagine altogether?
DMI is a platform for researchers and thinkers from across Google DeepMind, Google, and the wider global research community to work on and publish creative, deeply informed ideas about a world with AGI. They will not always agree, and they will likely change their minds, as more data and information comes to light at the fast-moving frontier. We created this institute precisely because broad-based intellectual discussion and debate are required to arrive at a consensus about how to address the challenges and opportunities we face as a society.
Nobody has all the answers about how AGI will be developed and deployed responsibly in the world, and it shouldn’t be technologists alone who provide them. Technological progress and expertise establish only the possibility of a new era; the responsibility of shaping its reality collectively belongs to society as a whole, including the arts and humanities, and governments. DMI brings diverse viewpoints together to identify the critical challenges we need to tackle, debate the potential solutions, and help ensure AGI improves the lives of everyone. We look forward to these discussions, which are essential as society thinks through how to safely steward AGI into the world.
DeepMind Institute directors:Shane Legg, James Manyika, Demis Hassabis
Managing editor:Shane Legg
Contact: dmi-editor@google.com
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