Google DeepMind
The lab behind AlphaGo, AlphaFold and Gemini
WHAT IT IS
DeepMind was founded in London in 2010, acquired by Google in 2014, and merged with Google Brain into Google DeepMind in 2023. It began with deep reinforcement learning: AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in 2016, and AlphaFold 2 made a breakthrough in protein structure prediction in 2020. Its recent focus is the multimodal Gemini family along with generative models such as Imagen, Veo and Lyria.
Why it matters
It pushed the boundary of what AI can do twice: AlphaGo showed that learning can beat the best human players, and AlphaFold produced structure predictions that experimental scientists actually use, not just numbers in a paper.
Key milestones
- 2010
Founded in London
- 2014
Acquired by Google
- 2016
AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol
- 2020
AlphaFold 2 broke through at CASP14
Representative products
7AlphaFold
2020Predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino-acid sequence
Imagen
2022Generates photorealistic images with cascaded diffusion and a large text encoder
NotebookLM
2023Answers only from the sources you give it, with citations
Lyria
2023Generates instrumental and vocal music from text prompts
Gemini
2023A natively multimodal general model built for very long context
Gemini
2024One chat entry point that gathers search, office apps and a multimodal model
Veo
2024Generates 1080p video clips with coherent shots