Pushmeet Kohli

Kohli received his PhD from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom in 2007, advised by Philip H. S. Torr, with the dissertation “Minimizing Dynamic and Higher order Energy Functions using Graph Cuts.” The dissertation won the British Machine Vision Association’s (BMVA) Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Award and was a runner-up for the British Computer Society’s (BCS) Distinguished Dissertation Award.⁠[1][1][2]

He worked at Microsoft for ten years, in its labs in Seattle, Cambridge, and Bangalore; he was a researcher in the Machine Learning and Perception group at Microsoft Research Cambridge and an associate of the Psychometric Centre at the University of Cambridge, served as technical advisor to Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer, and ultimately became Director of Research for the Cognition group.⁠[3][2][3][4]

His research spans machine learning, computer vision, information retrieval, and game theory, with papers published at conferences including ICCV, CVPR, NIPS, ICML, SIGGRAPH, and CHI, and awards at conferences including ECCV 2010, CHI 2014, WWW 2014, and CVPR 2015.⁠[3][3]

After leaving Microsoft, he joined DeepMind as a research scientist and research team leader.⁠[2][3]

On July 15, 2021, the DeepMind team published the paper “Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold” in Nature, with Kohli among the authors. AlphaFold, which predicts the three-dimensional structures of proteins, is one of the signature achievements of the research programs he leads; it later became a Nobel Prize-winning model and was the basis of the DeepMind spin-off Isomorphic Labs.⁠[5][5][5][4][4]

In 2023, TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.⁠[6][4]

On August 29, 2023, Google DeepMind launched SynthID, a tool for watermarking AI-generated images, initially available only to users of Imagen, the image generation model on Google Cloud’s Vertex platform. SynthID works with two neural networks: one makes subtle changes to the pixels of the original image, embedding a pattern invisible to the human eye, and the other identifies that pattern. Kohli, then vice president of research at Google DeepMind, said that traditional watermarks using visible overlays or metadata are “brittle,” whereas SynthID can still be detected after an image is screenshotted, rotated, or resized; he called the tool “experimental,” saying the company wanted to learn its strengths and weaknesses before rolling it out more widely.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7][7]

On May 20, 2025, Kohli, as “VP, Science and Strategic Initiatives, Google DeepMind,” announced the SynthID Detector verification portal: after users upload images, audio, video, or text generated with Google AI tools, the portal scans for SynthID watermarks and highlights the portions most likely to be watermarked. By this time SynthID had expanded from images to text, audio, and video, covering content generated by models including Gemini, Imagen, Lyria, and Veo, and more than 10 billion pieces of content had been watermarked.⁠[8][8][8][8]

The portal was rolled out first to early testers, with journalists, media professionals, and researchers able to join a waitlist. Google also said it had open-sourced SynthID text watermarking and partnered with NVIDIA to watermark videos generated by its Cosmos preview service, and announced a partnership with GetReal Security.⁠[8][8][8][8]

On June 3, 2026, he took part in a SXSW London session titled “Reimagining Scientific Discovery in the Age of AI.”⁠[4]

On October 7, 2026, Kohli announced on the Google blog that SynthID Detector was expanding from an early version for media professionals to everyone, available globally in English starting that day. The new version can check whether an image, video, or audio file was made with AI from Google or its partners, which include OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao, with Apple soon to join.⁠[9][9][9]

Google said that since its launch in 2023, SynthID had added imperceptible watermarks to more than 180 billion images and videos and to a combined 240,000 years of audio; the verification features built into Search, the Gemini app, and Chrome handle more than 1 million requests a day.⁠[9][9]

The unit he leads at Google DeepMind works across biology, materials, fusion, mathematics, software, and cybersecurity; his team has pioneered AI agents based on large language models for scientific and AI research, such as AlphaEvolve and AI Co-Scientist.⁠[6][4]

His earlier research interests include 3D reconstruction and rendering, probabilistic programming, machine learning systems for healthcare, and conversational agents for task completion.⁠[2]

Google DeepMind: Official website: https://deepmind.google/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]