This Blog has long followed the career of our most influential (now London-based) New Zealander Shane Legg, since we find his rise from Rotorua Lakes High School to become one of the world's most influential people, remarkable. Its on a par with Nelson-born Kiwi Ernest Rutherford.
We met up many years ago in London. He did an MSc in maths at the University of Auckland.
Yesterday Legg narrowly missed out on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he probably should have been included in: two of the winners are his colleagues at Deep Mind, the company which, more than any other by a long way, began the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Legg founded Deep Mind with Demis Hassabis, when they were students at University College London, and sold it to Google for $NZ 800 million. That was probably a mistake, given Elon Musk wanted to be their partner (since Google has now become like any other huge managerial monopoly corporation that emphasizes short term profits over long-term innovation, according to off-the-record comments from Kiwi insiders there).
Hassabis & John Jumper at Deep Mind, now a division of Google, won the Nobel for their work on computational protein design. There is some controversy about the Prize, since Hassabis is the CEO of the company, whereas shy & humble Kiwi Legg took on the position of Chief Scientist there. No doubt he was intimately connected with, and probably largely ultimately responsible, for much of the computation work for which the Nobel was awarded.
Its unusual to give the Prize to a CEO, who's more the business boss, rather than to a "Chief Scientist" type of person. Whatever one says about Kiwi universities, a bunch of our graduates are reshaping the world.
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
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