Where the ex-DeepMind crowd actually meets in London

Roughly weekly someone asks me where to meet "ex-DeepMind founders" in London. The honest answer is: in the same rooms as everyone else who works on AI in London, plus a couple of specific ones. There is no secret ex-DeepMind club.

I am going to refer to "the ex-DeepMind crowd" generically — meaning former employees of Google DeepMind, broadly construed — rather than naming specific individuals beyond what is publicly reported. People publicly run companies, people publicly speak at events; that is fair game. Anything beyond that is gossip.

For the rolling event list, AI events in London is the page I keep open.

The structural picture

DeepMind has been hiring in London for over a decade. The alumni base is sizeable. A meaningful fraction of London AI startups have at least one ex-DeepMind founder or early team member; the press has reported on plenty of these (Inflection, Mistral, various smaller ones — all publicly known). That ecosystem produces a gravitational pull on the London AI events scene.

What that does not mean: there is no monthly "ex-DeepMind founders dinner" you can find a link to. There are smaller dinners hosted by individuals, like in any tech ecosystem, but those follow the same friend-of-friend access pattern as the general AI dinner scene.

Public events with reliable ex-DeepMind presence

Caveat: "presence" here means "people from the alumni network have spoken or attended publicly", not guaranteed turnout.

Royal Society and Royal Institution lectures. When the topic is AI or ML, the speaker has often been a researcher with a DeepMind connection at some point. Public, often free, well organised.

The Alan Turing Institute events. Based at the British Library, runs a serious public lecture programme. ML and AI research talks regularly draw ex-DeepMind speakers and audience. Free, free RSVP via the Turing site.

NeurIPS / ICML satellite events in London. When the big ML conferences are around, London hosts satellite meetups and watch parties. The crowds are heavily research-flavoured.

London Machine Learning Meetup. Long-running, technical, free. The audience and speakers have included current and former DeepMind people consistently over the years.

MLOps London. More applied but the audience overlaps. Less "research", more "infra and deployment".

Founder-flavoured events

If you specifically want ex-DeepMind people who have gone on to start companies, the demo nights and founder evenings are where that subset shows up:

• EF London demo nights — the EF cohorts have included ex-DeepMind technical founders publicly.
• Air Street Capital's RAAIS-flavoured events — the AI venture firm runs founder evenings; the alumni overlap is real.
• The bigger AI conferences (Sifted summit, FT events with AI tracks) — speaker lists publicly include alumni.

What does not work

• DMing former DeepMinders on Twitter asking to meet. They get a lot of these. The hit rate is low.
• "Ex-DeepMind founders" Eventbrite events. If they are not run by an alumni member, they are usually marketing fluff.
• Walking into the DeepMind office in King's Cross. Same as the Anthropic point — it is a working office, not a public space.

What actually works

The same boring advice that works for any AI scene:

1. Go to the technical meetups (London ML Meetup, Turing Institute lectures, MLOps London).
2. Build something credible and talk about it publicly.
3. Show up to the founder demo nights.
4. Within six months you will know a chunk of the network and the introductions will happen organically.

That is unglamorous and slow. It is also true.

A note on the "ex-DeepMind" label

The label gets overused. Some people have spent eight years at the lab in core research roles. Some interned for a summer five years ago. Both technically count, both currently use it on LinkedIn, but the signals are very different. Calibrate your expectations of any given event by who is actually on the speaker list and who is actually announced.

The good news is that the people who genuinely come from a research background and have started serious companies are usually generous with their time at proper public events. They do panels, they speak at the technical meetups, they show up at hackathons as judges. You can engage with them in those settings without needing a special introduction.

Practical bits

• Turing Institute mailing list. Sign up. The lecture announcements are the single most useful subscription for this scene.
• London ML Meetup. RSVP early; the popular sessions cap.
• Hackathon judging panels. Check who is judging. The judges at the bigger AI hackathons frequently include alumni network members, and the post-hackathon Q&A is a real conversation, not a stage moment.
• Twitter follows. Several alumni run public technical threads. That is a much better proxy for what they are working on than LinkedIn.

The honest summary

The "ex-DeepMind crowd" is not a secret society. It is a recognisable subset of the London AI scene that overlaps heavily with the public events ecosystem. Go to the technical meetups, the demo nights, and the public lectures, and within a few months you will have run into a meaningful slice of it.

If your goal is to do business with someone specific, the path is the normal one: do interesting work, get a warm intro, do not cold-email asking for "15 minutes". The label on the LinkedIn does not change those rules.

Right. See you at the next Turing lecture.