The genius scientist of DeepMind passed away, and the AI ​​circle was extremely sad

Recently, Felix Hill, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, unfortunately passed away due to mental illness at the age of 41. This news triggered widespread concern and condolences in the AI ​​circle.

Felix has been battling severe mental health issues since early 2023, exhibiting severe depression and suicidal tendencies. Despite his remarkable achievements in academia, he ultimately could not overcome his inner pain.

Felix Hill is an outstanding AI scholar who co-created the natural language processing benchmarks GLUE and SuperGLUE. He graduated from the University of Oxford and received an MA in Linguistics and a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. Felix worked as a high school mathematics teacher and then worked at DeepMind for nearly eight years. His academic contributions have been widely recognized, with a total of 19,680 citations.

Felix's passing is saddened by many colleagues and friends. People took to social media to express their memory of him and concerns about his mental health issues. In one of Felix's blogs, he detailed his emotional breakdown after his mother's death and his traumatic experience in a mental hospital. He wrote that although he has achieved certain success and wealth in the field of AI, his inner anxiety and depression have become increasingly serious.

In this blog, Felix highlights the enormous pressures that come with modern AI work. He mentioned that the rapid development of the AI ​​field in recent years has made many researchers feel that they are in a state of "war" and are constantly facing competition and pressure. He hopes to draw more attention to mental health issues by sharing his experience. Felix's story has triggered people to think deeply about the mental health of AI workers. Many people believe that while pursuing technological breakthroughs, they also need to pay attention to the mental state of scientific researchers.

His funeral is scheduled to be held in north London on January 11 and will be broadcast live. This incident is a reminder that mental health issues cannot be ignored, especially in the highly competitive technology industry.