Demis Hassabis

Demis had visited Elon at SpaceX.

Elon and Demis had discussed which mission mattered most, space travel or developing AGI.

Elon had declared that humans needed to colonize Mars in case disaster struck Earth.

Demis had countered that killer AI robots might be one such disaster, but that the AI could obviously follow humans to Mars if it wanted to.

The two men had forged a competitive friendship and Elon had decided that Demis was right.

Powerful artificial intelligence might indeed be more consequential than space flight.

Elon promised to invest in DeepMind.

Now back to this flight that Larry Page and Elon and Luke Nosek are on.

I think this is how Larry Page found out about DeepMind.

So Elon says, there's only one AI company that I think is going to work.

I'm an investor in that company, DeepMind.

Now let's go back to another character, Peter Thiel.

A lot of this book at this part of the story, it's just a lot of back and forth and ups and downs in raising money.

Keep that in mind because everybody criticizes Demis for selling to Google.

But if you were going through what he was going through, he saw as a giant distraction and he needed a backer with essentially unlimited resources.

But there's just some interesting stories about how these other players on the board were viewing Demis.

Peter Thiel barely saw the deep mind team, and he felt instinctively suspicious of a fellow chess player.

A man who had spent his formative years mentally crushing opponents should be treated with caution, Theo reckoned.

And so while these ups and downs and this painful fundraising process is going on, Demas gets this email from Google, and he's willing to meet with him.

This is why, given his testy relationship with his venture capital backers, he was eager.