Felix Hill, a prominent DeepMind scientist, passes away and the AI ​​world loses its talents

DeepMind, an artificial intelligence research laboratory owned by Google, recently issued an obituary confirming the unfortunate death of its outstanding scientist Felix Hill. Hill made outstanding contributions in the field of natural language processing (NLP), and his death caused a huge loss to the entire AI community.

Who is Felix Hill?

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. He has worked in DeepMind for nearly eight years and achieved significant academic achievements, with 19,680 citations.

Since early 2023, Felix has been battling severe depression and suicidal tendencies. Despite his success in the field of AI, he suffered from an inner pain that he ultimately failed to overcome. Felix has shared in a blog his experience of an emotional breakdown and mental hospital treatment after his mother's death. He mentioned that the huge pressure in the AI ​​field made him feel unbearable. Despite his career achievements, his inner anxiety and depression became more and more serious.

Felix's death has deeply saddened many and raised concerns about the mental health of scientific researchers. In his blog, he called attention to mental health issues, especially in the highly competitive technology industry. His funeral will be held in north London on January 11 and will be broadcast live.