Demis Hassabis
speaker
3,420 appearances
27 recordings
18 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 7 Jul
Demis Hassabis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 16.
Appearances
This is a paradoxical moment, which I guess is sort of messing with my mind.
It should feel amazing, realizing all these dreams that we've had for more than 15 years.
But it doesn't feel like how I imagined it would feel.
The way it's going is this mad rush.
I've had to make my peace with that, recognize that it's going to be messy, and I'll just have to do my best, and maybe we, being the world, will muddle through somehow.
I'm optimistic still.
That excerpt is from the end of the book I'm going to talk about today, which is The Infinity Machine, Demis Hassabis' Deep Mind and the Quest for Superintelligence, and it was written by Sebastian Malaby.
The publisher was nice to send me an advanced copy.
And by the time you hear this episode, this book will be available to buy.
And I think that ending of the book is the perfect place to begin this episode.
And so I want to jump right into the introduction.
There's a bunch of highlights I have from the introduction and from the first chapter I think will give you a good overview of what I want to talk to you about today.
So it says this book is about intelligence.
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.
Showing 481–500 of 3,420 · page 25 of 171
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