The 21 smartest AI scientists working at Google DeepMind

Google DeepMind, a group of approximately 200 people aiming to "solve intelligence" in London, is arguably one of the most interesting AI companies operating in the world right now. It made history on March 9 when its "AlphaGo" system beat the world champion of Go, a Chinese board game that machines have been trying to master for decades.

However, who actually works at Google DeepMind beyond the three cofounders is a bit of a mystery, possibly because Google doesn't want to risk shouting about them and losing its smartest staff to rivals that are also focusing on artificial intelligence, such as Facebook.

DeepMind's talented workforce is likely to have been one of the main reasons that Google decided to spend £400 million on the company last January, so we thought it was about time someone took a look at who actually works there.

DeepMind, founded in 2010, is heavily involved in a lot of research and a number of its academically-focused staff have been busy publishing papers on artificial intelligence since the company was incorporated. A page on the DeepMind website details all of these academics papers and which DeepMind employees contributed to them.

In order to identify the most impressive DeepMind scientists, Business Insider analysed the page to see which DeepMind staff have contributed to the most scientific papers. Google was unable to confirm whether all of the authors worked for DeepMind so we have linked to a source where possible. We also contacted several of the scientists directly.

This article was originally published in December 2015. It was updated with new information and more employees in March 2016. All the additional people that have been added have at least four academic papers to their name.