South African scientist Shakir Mohamed is a research director at Google DeepMind in London, according to MyBroadband. DeepMind is the main artificial intelligence (AI) research lab of Alphabet, the company that owns Google.
Mohamed was born in 1984 and grew up in Lenasia. The Johannesburg township was set up under apartheid for the city’s Indian community. He is seen as one of the leading minds in AI around the world.
“My personal mission is to work on machine learning that has a social purpose,” Mohamed said in 2023. “This is one of the values that drives my work.”
He started studying at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2002. He said his time at Wits showed him the real problems South Africa faced for the first time.
“It’s ultimately one of my enduring memories, to come to Wits and see the changes in the country playing out around you,” he said in an interview with the university.
Mohamed studied at the School of Electrical and Information Engineering. He said the degree gave him skills he could use in many jobs, from electronics to software and data science.
He finished his Bachelor of Science degree in 2005. He won the Dr DL Bernstein Award for top work in electrical and information engineering. Wits later gave him the Chancellor’s Medal as well.
After his studies, he worked at Nedbank as a business analyst. His work there focused on credit risk and scorecards. In 2007 he moved to the UK to study at the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD.
In 2011 he began his research career at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Back then, few people knew much about machine learning.
“When I was a PhD student, if someone knew what machine learning was, that was amazing,” Mohamed told Time Magazine in 2023. “It would literally make our day.”
In 2013 he joined DeepMind, then a small startup in London, as a senior researcher. Google bought the company a year later. By then, Mohamed was already leading work on AI, science and society there.
In 2023 Google joined DeepMind with Google Brain to form Google DeepMind. The new lab built Gemini, Google’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. MyBroadband reported that the lab has since launched Gemini 4 Argon, its most powerful model so far.
Mohamed has also kept close ties with Africa. In 2017 he co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba with South African AI experts Benjamin Rosman and Vukosi Marivate.
The Indaba works to grow machine learning and AI skills in Africa. Its goal is to help Africans own and shape the technology, not just watch it.
Mohamed and Rosman have both been named on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI. That list also included Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic.
Mohamed and Marivate are both trustees on the executive board of the Deep Learning Indaba. Rosman also sits on that board.
Source: this article is based on reporting by MyBroadband. Image: MyBroadband. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Technology desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Werner Jacobs covers technology for Tzaneen Voice. Werner reports on mobile networks, data prices, internet access, smartphones, apps, AI, cybersecurity and South African tech companies. Each story explains what a new product, price change or policy means for ordinary users in South Africa.