DeepMind snowballed from there. Hassabis and Legg enlisted both Hinton and LeCun as technical advisors, and the start-up quickly hired many of the field’s up-and-coming researchers, including Vlad Mnih, who studied with Hinton in Toronto; a Turkish-born researcher, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who worked under LeCun in New York; and Alex Graves, who studied under Jürgen Schmidhuber in Switzerland before a postdoc with Hinton. As they’d told Peter Thiel, the starting point was games.
