Demis Hassabis

On the one hand, it's a portrait of a remarkable human, a chess prodigy, a Nobel laureate, a polymathic thinker.

On the other hand, it tells the stories of its quest to build remarkable machines, systems that are intuitive, creative, and even original.

And so even though Demis is in the greatest competition of his life, one that he is built for, one that he is relishing, he gave the author an unbelievable amount of his time, and this is why.

Believing that societies will never trust inventors of transformational technologies unless they understand what makes them tick, Demas agreed to the deep access I needed.

And so then the author, Sebastian, talks about some of the personality traits that Demas has.

It says Demas came across as phenomenally articulate.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with Demas, and that is exactly how I would describe him.

He is phenomenally articulate.

And one of the things that is obvious if you read the book and one of the things that jumped out when you study him is he is a missionary.

It's one of the things I most admire about him.

He has been talking about this mission for a decade and a half before it has basically consumed our entire world.

And so the introduction pulls out some of these ideas that he's been repeating for a very long time.

Intelligence is fundamental.

It is the root of all else.

It is the mechanism through which humans perceive reality.

It's the mind that creates our reality around us, Demis said.

Richard Feynman said, what I cannot build, I do not understand.

Following Feynman's dictum, in order to grasp human intelligence, scientists would have to build an artificial analog, a machine that mimicked human thinking.

This next sentence is very important.

AI's practical or profit-making potential was a secondary concern.