Demis Hassabis

Damas was delivering this sort of talk repeatedly at tech gatherings in the 2010s.

The boyish philosopher on stage was clearly not a stereotypical entrepreneur peddling a hot app that promised untold riches.

And then if you think about that excerpt that appears at the end of the book that he's like, you know, I'm this weird British outlier and I'm just trying to follow my own path and following my passions and staying true to what I believe in.

Founding a company to build AGI back in 2010 was viewed by others as ridiculous, as laughable.

When they founded DeepMind in 2010, fellow scientists had rolled their eyes, believing the construction of human-like AI to be impossible.

Almost every potential investor had turned them away.

But Demis had nonetheless scrapped together funding and persuaded gifted researchers to join him, all on the strength of his exhilarating vision.

And so his vision of the future is to use AI to solve every single scientific problem that plagues humanity.

It is a very optimistic vision.

That's why I wanted to include that excerpt at the very beginning of this episode.

The optimistic vision of AI discovery has history in its corner.

Past innovations from gunpowder to nuclear fission have made wars more terrifying and accidents more lethal.

But the general effect on technological change has been to amplify our experiences and extend our lifespans.

And the very act of creating new technologies is intrinsic to being human.

And so it gives some of the examples of the accomplishments that DeepMind had in earlier in their history.

In 2016, DeepMind solved a grand challenge in computer science, creating a system that surpassed the intuitive brilliance of the world's best players of the ancient board game Go.

There's a great documentary that you can watch on YouTube.

It is about Demis and DeepMind and some of their accomplishments.

It's called The Thinking Game.

So back to this.