Demis Hassabis

The ultimate aim is to use these general-purpose technologies and apply them to all sorts of important real world problems.

However, the more significant aspect of all this for us is that Alpha Go isn’t just an expert system built with handcrafted rules like, for example, DeepBlue was, but instead it uses general machine learning techniques to figure out for itself how to win at Go, the ultimate challenge, though, which still lies ahead, is to beat one of the best players in the world.

While games are the perfect platform for developing and testing AI algorithms quickly and efficiently, ultimately we want to apply these techniques to important real world problems, because the methods we’ve used are general purpose, our hope is that one day they could be extended to help us address some of society’s toughest and most pressing problems – from medical diagnostics, to climate modeling to smart phone assistance. We’re excited to see what we can use this technology to tackle next.