Demis Hassabis

The program proved intelligent enough to beat Demas' little brother.

This is what Demas said about it.

It was amazing that I made something that could beat him.

And so Demas gets introduced to AI through gaming.

He's reading all these gaming magazines.

At this point, he's 16 years old.

He gets into Cambridge, but they're saying he's too young to attend.

So he's like this one-year gap.

And so he's going to work out the best gaming studio in Europe.

It's called Bullfrog.

And the way he gets there is he read these gaming magazines that had an ad where saying if you win this competition to create this game, the prize was a job at Bullfrog.

And so this is a description of the environment there and some of his coworkers.

Demas was fascinated by the other Bullfrog employees, technically talented, self-made young men, many of whom had dropped out of high school, being too idiosyncratically gifted or plain wild to sit meekly in a classroom.

The line between working and philosophizing blurred.

We were brainstorming these big ideas.

There was this thrill of unbridled creation.

And so the founder of Bullfrog is this guy named Peter Molyneux, and he gives Demis a life-changing book.

The book is called Godel, Escher, and Bach.

And then the way the book is described in this book, it says, it was a firehose of a book that inspired a remarkable number of future AI scientists.

As a chess prodigy, Demis had long been curious about the workings of his own mind.