Dr Manish Gupta Illuminates AI’s Frontier at CCDS

On 14 August 2025, NTU’s College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS) hosted Dr Manish Gupta, Senior Director at Google DeepMind, for a keynote that brought together students, faculty, and researchers for a sweeping tour of AI’s evolution, and its most urgent challenges ahead. 

Titled "The Transformative Power of AI and Open Challenges," the session traced how artificial intelligence has advanced from narrow, task-specific tools to powerful foundation models like BERT, PaLM, and Gemini. These general-purpose systems now underpin a broad spectrum of applications across science, communication, creativity, and more. 

“Foundation models are not the final destination,” Dr Gupta said. “They’re more like the launchpad from which we can go after problems that we don’t even know about today.” 

He highlighted DeepMind’s Gemini 1.5 and 2.0 models, showcasing how they handle complex, multimodal tasks with extended context windows and agentic capabilities, including real-time environmental interpretation via Project Astra.

As Dr Gupta explained, DeepMind’s work is already impacting millions—whether through the addition of 110 new languages to Google Translate, creative collaborations with Grammy-winning artists, or AI tools that use satellite imagery to support farmers in data-scarce regions. 

A central theme of the talk was the importance of inclusive and culturally adaptive AI. Dr Gupta spotlighted Project Vaani, an initiative collecting speech data from all 773 districts in India to preserve endangered languages and enable richer contextual understanding. He also spoke of ongoing collaborations in Southeast Asia, including efforts with AI Singapore. 

It was during this wide-ranging discussion that Dr Gupta shared a notable update: Google DeepMind is in the process of establishing a new office in Singapore. The site will focus on multimodal generation, LLM reasoning, and culturally adapted computer vision research, with hiring already underway.

The talk concluded with an engaging Q&A, where students asked incisive questions ranging from model efficiency to the ethics of AI-driven decision-making. Dr Gupta encouraged them to explore opportunities at DeepMind’s global offices, noting that while formal collaborations with local institutions will take shape over time, the path is open for Singapore-based talent to contribute. 

🎓 For students eager to shape the future of AI, job openings are live now at: https://www.deepmind.com/careers