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Helen King’s job is all about keeping AI safe as Google scales - Fast Company
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This Fast Company profile of Helen King, Google DeepMind's senior director of responsibility, highlights how one of the world's largest AI organizations approaches safety and responsibility at massive scale, offering insight into institutional AI safety practices.
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Summary
This article profiles Helen King, Google DeepMind's senior director of responsibility, who has been with the organization since its early DeepMind days. It explores how Google approaches AI safety and responsibility at unprecedented scale, given that its products reach billions of users. King discusses the challenges of maintaining trustworthiness while rapidly deploying experimental AI features.
Key Points
- •Helen King joined DeepMind in its early stealth-mode days and has grown with the organization through its Google acquisition and merger with Google Brain.
- •Google DeepMind's scale—with products reaching 2 billion users each—amplifies both the benefits and risks of AI deployment.
- •DeepMind formed a Safety and Responsibility Council as early as 2018, predating the current AI safety discourse surge.
- •King emphasizes that being known as trustworthy creates high expectations even for experimental and early-stage AI products.
- •Open conversations about safety and responsibility are described as critical as AI becomes embedded in everyday tools like Gmail and Search.
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Helen King’s job is all about keeping AI safe as Google scales - Fast Company
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12-12-2024AI 20
Helen King’s job is all about keeping AI safe as Google scales
As billions of people are exposed to AI in products such as Gmail, one of Google DeepMind’s longest-serving employees says that open conversations about safety and responsibility are critical.
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[Photo: Leila Hajaj]
span>span]:whitespace-nowrap">BY Harry McCracken
More than a dozen years ago, U.K.-based game producer Helen King was about to take a new job at Ubisoft in Canada. She had already boxed up her possessions and was getting her visa in order when an opportunity at a London-based AI startup unexpectedly presented itself. King found it irresistible, even though she had no background in the technology—she’d even opted out of AI courses as a computer science student.
“Some of my friends still haven’t forgiven me,” she jokes. “Because I then had to say, ‘I’m not moving to Canada, and I’m joining a company that’s in stealth mode, so I can’t actually tell you what I’m doing.’”
The company in question was AI startup DeepMind, and its founders, Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman, enthralled King with the audacity of their vision. “They talked about wanting to solve intelligence and the opportunities that would come with that,” such as breakthroughs in cancer research, she remembers. As a program manager for research, she chipped in on everything from recruitment to running conferences.
Of course, DeepMind didn’t stay tiny and stealthy forever. King was there when it was acquired by Google in 2014 and made headlines with research breakthroughs such as AlphaGo and AlphaFold. In 2023, Google merged DeepMind with another one of its AI research arms, Google Brain, to form Google DeepMind (GDM). It put Hassabis in charge of the combined operation, whose technologies include the Gemini Large Language Models at the heart of many of Google’s AI advances. Work also continues on longstanding projects such as AlphaFold, whose protein-prediction AI is now at the heart of Alphabet’s drug discovery startup Isomorphic Labs.
Today, King is GDM’s senior director of responsibility and a strategic advisor to research. They’re particularly weighty jo
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