{"id":604791,"date":"2025-08-01T09:02:44","date_gmt":"2025-08-01T07:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=604791"},"modified":"2025-08-01T09:07:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T07:07:20","slug":"the-south-african-ai-researcher-who-has-worked-for-microsoft-apple-and-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/ai\/604791-the-south-african-ai-researcher-who-has-worked-for-microsoft-apple-and-google.html","title":{"rendered":"The South African AI researcher who has worked for Microsoft, Apple, and Google"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

South African AI researcher Ulrich Paquet has had an extensive career, working for three of the big seven tech companies: Google, Microsoft, and Apple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has worked on several significant projects throughout his career, including the launch of the Xbox One and Google DeepMind\u2019s AlphaZero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paquet attended the University of Pretoria, where he completed a Master\u2019s degree in Computer Science and first developed his interest in AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He then received a Commonwealth Scholarship from the University of Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in Statistical Machine Learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His thesis concerned probabilistic principles in supervised and unsupervised learning, which underpins the basis of machine learning and AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Therefore, when Microsoft came looking for people to work on the upcoming Xbox One\u2019s recommendation system, he immediately took the job and found himself in Israel within two days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe did all the machine learning design for the backend recommender system, which took about two or three years to get right,\u201d he said in a 2024 interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After helping launch the Xbox One, Paquet returned to the UK and joined a startup called Vocal IQ, which described itself as the \u201cworld\u2019s first self-learning dialogue API.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apple acquired the company for an undisclosed amount in 2015, which saw Paquet appointed as a research manager at the tech giant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, he remained there only for a year before joining Google DeepMind as a senior research scientist in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deep Learning Indaba and Alpha Zero<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The training took several days, totalling 41 TPU-years and cost 3×10^22 floating point operations per second, according to Epoch.AI<\/a>, the <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was amazing how they thought about chess, which was so different and was done in a way that you could almost mistake for creativity,\u201d Magnus Carlsen said on the Lex Fridman podcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe way AlphaZero sacrifices pieces like a knight or two or three pawns is hard to understand and fascinating to see.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paquet\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba with fellow South African and DeepMind researcher Shakir Mohamed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two recall attending an AI conference and realising that African researchers and their work were underrepresented at these types of events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To try and solve this issue, the two started the Deep Learning Indaba to strengthen African AI and ensure that \u201cAfricans are owners and shapers of future advances in AI.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The indaba is held annually, with the first taking place at the University of Witwatersrand and the most recent in Dakar, Senegal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2023, Paquet was appointed as the executive director of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Paquet discusses machine learning and chess at a Deep Learning Indaba event in Tunisia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Vladimir Kramnik uses AlphaZero to analyse a chess game<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Attendees of a Deep Learning Indaba event in Stellenbosch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Ulrich Paquet and Shakir Mohamed, while at Cambridge<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Ulrich Paquet has worked on several significant projects throughout his career, including the launch of the Xbox One and Google DeepMind\u2019s AlphaZero.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341175,"featured_media":604931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92837],"tags":[605,88946,123,100796,100798,42810,100813,19572],"class_list":["post-604791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","tag-apple","tag-google-deepmind","tag-microsoft","tag-shakir-mohamed","tag-ulrich-paquet","tag-university-of-cambridge","tag-vocaliq","tag-xbox-one"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604791"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":604873,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604791\/revisions\/604873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}