Pushmeet Kohli

Pushmeet Kohli grew up in Dehradun, in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, and moved to Britain to study, taking a PhD in computer vision at Oxford Brookes University under Philip Torr; his thesis on graph-cut methods won the Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Award. He then spent nearly 11 years at Microsoft Research, ending as director of research in its Cognition group, which worked on systems able to carry out most of the tasks people do.

He joined DeepMind in 2017 and soon set up its Safe and Reliable AI team, which studied the problems that arise when machine learning models are deployed, as distinct from the long-run AGI safety work Shane Legg had led "from day zero." He also built the lab's science program. As head of what became the AI for Science and Strategic Initiatives unit he oversaw the team around AlphaFold, and is a co-author of the 2021 AlphaFold paper. His unit went on to AlphaTensor (October 2022), which found faster algorithms for multiplying matrices; FunSearch (December 2023), which used a language model to find new constructions in combinatorics; and, in 2025, AlphaEvolve, a Gemini-based agent that designs algorithms. He co-led SynthID, the watermark Google launched for AI images in August 2023 and extended to text in a Nature paper in October 2024.

TIME named him to its 2023 list of the 100 most influential people in AI, describing him as, in his own words, "cautiously optimistic or optimistically cautious." Kohli is a vice president of research and Distinguished Scientist at Google DeepMind, and by 2026 his Google biography also listed him as Chief Scientist of Google Cloud. His June 2026 talk at SXSW London was billed under his Google DeepMind title, and no departure had been reported by September 2026.