The South African AI researcher who has worked for Microsoft, Apple, and Google
South African AI researcher Ulrich Paquet has had an extensive career, working for three of the big seven tech companies: Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
He has worked on several significant projects throughout his career, including the launch of the Xbox One and Google DeepMind’s AlphaZero.
Paquet attended the University of Pretoria, where he completed a Master’s degree in Computer Science and first developed his interest in AI.
He then received a Commonwealth Scholarship from the University of Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in Statistical Machine Learning.
His thesis concerned probabilistic principles in supervised and unsupervised learning, which underpins the basis of machine learning and AI.
After completing his PhD, Paquet landed a job as a software engineer at a company called Immense in the UK, where he worked on developing technologies related to facial recognition and image similarity search.
He then joined Microsoft as a senior researcher in 2010, where he would remain for five years, working in the UK and Herzliya, Israel. While there, he was part of the Xbox One launch team.
Paquet says he was part of a Microsoft research team that developed systems for recommending products to customers based on their preferences, behaviour, and other data.
At the time, he recalled his team working for 16 hours a day and constantly being burnt out. However, Paquet said he refused to resign before a date he had set for himself.
Therefore, when Microsoft came looking for people to work on the upcoming Xbox One’s recommendation system, he immediately took the job and found himself in Israel within two days.
“We did all the machine learning design for the backend recommender system, which took about two or three years to get right,” he said in a 2024 interview.
“I got goosebumps when everyone started turning on their consoles and we saw the numbers pour into the backend. I still have the original white Xbox One at home from launch day.”
After helping launch the Xbox One, Paquet returned to the UK and joined a startup called Vocal IQ, which described itself as the “world’s first self-learning dialogue API.”
Apple acquired the company for an undisclosed amount in 2015, which saw Paquet appointed as a research manager at the tech giant.
However, he remained there only for a year before joining Google DeepMind as a senior research scientist in 2016.
Deep Learning Indaba and Alpha Zero
One of the most notable projects Paquet has worked on while at DeepMind is AlphaZero, software developed to master the games of chess, shogi, and go.
The program was trained via self-play using 5,000 first-generation tensor processing units (TPU) to generate the games. It also had no access to opening books or endgame tables.
DeepMind research scientist Nenad Tomasev noted that this made the model special, as it was trained without inputting previous human knowledge, like several other algorithms.
The training took several days, totalling 41 TPU-years and cost 3×10^22 floating point operations per second, according to Epoch.AI, the
“It was amazing how they thought about chess, which was so different and was done in a way that you could almost mistake for creativity,” Magnus Carlsen said on the Lex Fridman podcast.
“The way AlphaZero sacrifices pieces like a knight or two or three pawns is hard to understand and fascinating to see.”
Paquet’s most recent work on the program included collaborating with Russian chess grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik on how minor rule adjustments to chess would alter the game at a superhuman level.
He also co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba with fellow South African and DeepMind researcher Shakir Mohamed.
The two recall attending an AI conference and realising that African researchers and their work were underrepresented at these types of events.
To try and solve this issue, the two started the Deep Learning Indaba to strengthen African AI and ensure that “Africans are owners and shapers of future advances in AI.”
The indaba is held annually, with the first taking place at the University of Witwatersrand and the most recent in Dakar, Senegal.
In 2023, Paquet was appointed as the executive director of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
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