creators

Shane Legg: DeepMind co-founder, Chief AGI Scientist

Shane Legg co-founded DeepMind and is its Chief AGI Scientist, leading Google DeepMind's AGI Safety Council. He was appointed CBE in the 2019 Birthday Honours.

Shane Legg is a co-founder of DeepMind and, in the lab's own words, its Chief AGI Scientist. Google DeepMind's post on its approach to AGI, published on 2 April 2025, states that its AGI Safety Council, which weighs AGI risk and recommends safety measures, is led by "Shane Legg, Co-Founder and Chief AGI Scientist at Google DeepMind". His own X bio gives the same title and links deepmind.com as his work site. The lab's about page dates DeepMind's start to 2010 and names Demis Hassabis, another co-founder, as chief executive. Before DeepMind he worked at the Swiss AI institute IDSIA with Marcus Hutter on how machine intelligence could be measured at all. Their papers include "A Universal Measure of Intelligence for Artificial Agents" (IJCAI 2005) and "Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence" in Minds and Machines in December 2007. Hutter's bibliography calls Legg's 2008 PhD thesis award-winning. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 Birthday Honours. The London Gazette's list of 8 June 2019 records him as "Dr. Shane LEGG, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, DeepMind Technologies Ltd. For services to the Science and Technology Sector and to Investment."

Specialization

artificial general intelligence, AI safety, measures of machine intelligence, reinforcement learning

Country

United Kingdom