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DeepMind
DeepMind is a British‑American artificial intelligence research lab founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman, and acquired by Google in 2014. In 2023, it merged with Google’s Brain team to form **Google DeepMind**, now a central AI division within Alphabet. The lab is known for breakthroughs in **deep reinforcement learning** and landmark systems like **AlphaGo**, which defeated a Go world champion, **AlphaZero** for mastering multiple games from scratch, and **AlphaFold**, which solved the decades‑old challenge of predicting protein structures. DeepMind’s research spans from game‑playing agents like MuZero and AlphaStar to generative AI models such as Gemini, Imagen, Veo, and Lyria. Its mission is to build safe, general‑purpose AI that advances science, benefits humanity, and tackles some of the hardest problems in technology and research.
DeepSeek
A Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, co‑founder of the hedge fund High‑Flyer, and headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. It specializes in developing open‑weight large language models meaning the model parameters are publicly shared while focusing on extreme efficiency in training and deployment. Its flagship model, DeepSeek‑R1, launched in January 2025, delivers performance comparable to leading systems like GPT‑4 but at a fraction of the cost, reportedly training for around 6 million USD versus the 100 million‑plus often spent by U.S. tech giants. This was achieved through techniques such as mixture‑of‑experts (MoE) layers, algorithmic optimizations, and training on less powerful export‑approved chips, all while consuming far less compute than rivals. DeepSeek’s rapid rise combining open access, low cost, and high capability has been described as “upending AI,” sparking global attention and even being called a “Sputnik moment” for the industry due to its potential to disrupt both the AI software and hardware markets.
Dr. Roman Yampolskiy
Dr. Roman Yampolskiy is a computer scientist and Associate Professor at the University of Louisville’s Speed School of Engineering, where he directs the Cyber Security Lab. Born in Riga, Latvia he earned his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University at Buffalo in 2008. He is best known for his pioneering work in AI safety, a term he is credited with coining and for warning about the existential risks of advanced artificial intelligence. Yampolskiy has authored over 100 publications and several books, including Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach and Considerations on the AI Endgame. His research spans AI safety, cybersecurity, behavioral biometrics, and the limits of intelligence, and he is a frequent voice in global debates on controlling superintelligent AI.