Demis Hassabis

A deep-pocketed parent company could free him from the endless fundraising negotiations that cluttered his life and pulled his attention away from DeepMind's research.

I was having these inane conversations nonstop with investors.

I felt my brain was atrophying.

I'm talking about the biggest invention ever, and they keep coming back to where's the widget.

And I'm like, I'm going to revolutionize all widgets so I can pick you a random widget if you want me to.

But you obviously haven't gotten the point if you're asking me this.

And so the fundraising was so bad, at one point they almost ran out of money.

Somebody would say, you know, we're in for X amount, and then they'd renege.

And again, I think this just pushes Demis back into choosing Google.

DeepMind's near-death experience forced Demis to come to terms with the fact that Blue Sky Research was a poor fit for venture capital.

It was time to find a new backer.

And so he describes why he sold to Google and he describes Larry Page's pitch to him, which I thought was interesting.

Demis's goal was to create AGI.

So why bother with the idea of an independent deep mind?

Google was the obvious place to realize his ambition.

Why don't you take advantage of what I've already created, Larry Page asked Demis.

It was a recruitment pitch that he'd used successfully on other startup founders.

He was basically telling me, maybe you could build a company like Google, but it would take the best part of your career.

If my real mission was to build AGI, then why don't I use all the resources that he's accumulated?

I thought that was a pretty good argument.