PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Chris Apps

Chris Apps is an AI programme leader whose career spans research delivery and work on game AI, interactive worlds, weather and power systems. He worked on DeepMind’s AlphaStar team in 2019. In 2024, he coauthored Genie and two power-grid AI papers, provided licensing support for GenCast, and Genie won ICML’s Best Paper award. He coauthored the Gemini 2.5 report in 2025. Since September 2026, he is a cofounder of Ineffable Intelligence and leads mission acceleration.

Now at
Ineffable Intelligence
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2019

    AlphaStar at DeepMind

    In 2019, he works on DeepMind’s AlphaStar team. AlphaStar learns StarCraft II from raw game-interface data through supervised learning and reinforcement learning.

  2. February 2024

    A Best Paper for Genie

    In February 2024, he coauthors Genie, a generative interactive environment trained on unlabelled Internet videos to generate action-controllable virtual worlds. ICML gives Genie a Best Paper award in 2024.

  3. March 2024

    CANOS for power grids

    In March 2024, he coauthors CANOS, a graph neural network that predicts near-optimal solutions to the AC optimal power-flow problem and handles changes to grid topology.

  4. June 2024

    The OPFData dataset

    OPFData presents a large collection of solved AC optimal power-flow problems with topological perturbations; he coauthors the dataset paper in June 2024.

  5. December 2024

    Licensing GenCast

    In December 2024, he provides licensing support for GenCast, Google DeepMind’s high-resolution AI ensemble weather model.

  6. July 2025

    The Gemini 2.5 report

    In July 2025, he coauthors the Gemini 2.5 report, which covers advanced reasoning, multimodality, long context and next-generation agentic capabilities.

  7. September 2026

    Mission acceleration at Ineffable

    Before DeepMind, he helps run technology-transformation programmes at Barclays and Deloitte. At DeepMind, he leads technical program and research delivery for large research teams. In September 2026, he joins Ineffable Intelligence as a cofounder and leads mission acceleration.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  3. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  4. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Google. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Chris Apps yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. AlphaStar: Mastering the real-time strategy game StarCraft II deepmind.google. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Genie: Generative Interactive Environments deepmind.google. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. CANOS: A Fast and Scalable Neural AC-OPF Solver Robust To N-1 Perturbations arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. OPFData: Large-scale datasets for AC optimal power flow with topological perturbations arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. GenCast predicts weather and the risks of extreme conditions with state-of-the-art accuracy deepmind.google. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Exclusive: Ineffable Intelligence adds six ‘cofounders,’ hiring veterans from Google DeepMind, InstaDeep and venture firm Flying Fish fortune.com. Checked 22 October 2026.