Shane Legg

Machine learning researcher, entrepreneur
Shane Legg is driving one of the greatest transformations in history: the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Why you should listen

Shane Legg is cofounder and Chief AGI Scientist at Google DeepMind, where he leads the technical AGI safety team. He is a distinguished alumni of Waikato University, and obtained his PhD from the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA) in Switzerland. His thesis proposed a formal definition of machine intelligence, for which he was awarded the Canadian Singularity Institute research prize. He spent a year as a postdoc at the Swiss Finance Institute, building models of human decision-making, followed by two years at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. He is an Honorary Fellow of University College London, and in 2017 received the Digital Masters Award for Excellence in Technology. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to the science and technology sector and to investment.

Shane Legg’s TED talk