Shane Legg grew up in New Zealand and attended Rotorua Lakes High School. He finished undergraduate studies at the University of Waikato in 1996 and earned an MSc at the University of Auckland the same year, with a thesis on Solomonoff induction.
He worked in software development at private companies, including Adaptive Intelligence and Ben Goertzel's WebMind. He then completed a PhD in 2008 at the IDSIA institute, supervised by Marcus Hutter, with a thesis titled Machine Super Intelligence.
After a postdoctoral fellowship in finance and a research post at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, he co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. Google bought the company in 2014.
DeepMind merged with Google Brain in 2023 to form Google DeepMind. Legg is its Chief AGI Scientist. He was appointed CBE in the 2019 Birthday Honours.