Shane Legg

Shane Legg CBE (born 1973 or 1974[2]) is a machine learning researcher and entrepreneur. With Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, he cofounded DeepMind Technologies (later bought by Google and now called Google DeepMind), and works there as the chief AGI scientist.[3][4] He is also known for his academic work on artificial general intelligence, including his thesis supervised by Marcus Hutter.[5] Legg attended Rotorua Lakes High School in Rotorua, on New Zealand's North Island.[6] He completed his undergraduate studies at Waikato University in 1996.[7] Also in 1996, he obtained his MSc degree with a thesis entitled "Solomonoff Induction", with Cristian S. Calude at the University of Auckland.[8][9] In the early 2000s, Legg re-introduced and popularized with Ben Goertzel the term "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), to describe an AI that can do practically any cognitive task a human can do.[10] At that time, talking about AGI "would put you on the lunatic fringe".[5] Legg is known for his concern of existential risk from AI, highlighted in 2011 in an interview on LessWrong[4][11] and in 2023 he signed the statement on AI risk of extinction.[12][13] 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"[14] and the startup WebMind founded by Ben Goertzel.[5]