Demis Hassabis

You have Larry Page.

Mark Zuckerberg pops up for a little bit.

A few years from where we are in the story, Sam Altman pops up.

But in January 2014, Demis goes ahead with Google, and this is something he's never regretted.

Google bought DeepMind for $650 million.

Demis netted $136 million.

Not long after the Google acquisition, DeepMind was paying $260 million in staff costs annually, six times more than its total spending during its first three years of existence.

From Demis' perspective, the advantages of the sale were overwhelming.

And so in the documentary, The Thinking Game, he talks about this.

He says, our investors didn't want to sell, but we decided this was the best thing for the mission.

We were underselling in terms of value before it matured, and you could have sold DeepMind for more money in the future.

The reason is because there's no time to waste.

There are so many things that have to be done while I'm still alive and my brain is still in gear.

And then he has a very compelling argument for this.

How many billions...

Would you trade for another five years of life to do what you set out to do?

And so one of the things that they're working on is they want to build AlphaGo.

They want to build a system that would defeat a world champion at Go.

This exchange between Demis and Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, says a lot about Demis' ambition.

Demis told Sergey that he wanted to build a computer that would defeat the world champion at Go.