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Demis Hassabis, the driving force behind Google DeepMind, is ascending to the role of chief scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company, replacing Jeff Dean who is leaving to work at a start-up.
The role will enable Hassabis to "put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," or artificial general intelligence, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the company's Inside Google blog.
Hassabis' attention will still be divided, however: He will continue to lead research at Google spin-off Isomorphic Labs, which works on drug discovery, and although he will no longer be CEO of DeepMind, he will be its chair. Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. He is currently its CTO.
Hassabis has been a strong promoter of AGI, defined by Google as the "hypothetical intelligence of a machine that possesses the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can."
He has a long career in AI, having helped found DeepMind in 2010. He has been a prominent figure in the AGI field, prophesying in May that it will be a viable technology within three years. He has been keen to tackle any barriers in the way of developing the technology; just last month,
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AI PROBLEMS TechSpot: Amazon is blocking some users from seeing reviews after mistaking them for AI bots. "WTF?! Amazon is restricting access to customer reviews for some shoppers after mistakenly identifying them […]
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 Longevity has become a bit of a buzz word, and has become increasingly aligned with the tech industry. But while it remains unclear whether the billions of US dollars being invested in life-extending bioscience is something any of us can access, a timely report from Harvard Medical
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As newspapers move online, the buildings that once housed their printing presses need new occupants.
The Minnesota Star Tribune has just sold its old printing plant on the edge of Minneapolis to the aptly named property developer Legacy Investing, which plans to create a new data center there. has found the ideal way to bring them back to life.
This is the second such move by Legacy. It has already bought a building in downtown Minneapolis that it has transformed into a data center for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
These old buildings, already connected to power, are an attractive option for developers — especially with some grid operators threatening power cuts for new-build data centers during power shortages.
Legacy is taking a small-is-beautiful approach rather than replicating the massive data centers being built for Big Tech firms. Those are the size of small towns and consume huge volumes of water and hundreds of megawatts of power, while the capacity of Legacy's downtown building is about 30 MW, and it expects the Star Tribune site to host around 20 MW
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 U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer has teamed up with several of his Senate colleagues to demand Apple commit to not purchasing chips from Chinese companies ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) or Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC). [PDF]
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 The Google logo is pictured at the entrance to the Google offices in London, Britain January 18, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKayIndia's competition regulator on Friday ordered an investigation into Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google following allegations by news publishers, saying its initial view was that the tech giant had violated certain antitrust laws.
In its order, the Competition Commission of India (ICC) said Google dominates some online search servic
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 SpaceX revealed Monday that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be its first space tourist.
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