Demis Hassabis

Google had liberated him from the fundraising hamster wheel.

Google allowed him to retain DeepMind's independent culture in London.

Google had even granted his followers privileged status.

People that worked at DeepMind could get into any Google office globally.

But people that worked at Google were barred from DeepMind's premises.

In some weeks, a single research team at DeepMind might gobble up more computational resources than Google's worldwide Gmail network, which had 900 million users.

And so Elon and others see what's going on, and this is going to lead to the founding of OpenAI as a counter to DeepMind and Google.

Sometime in early 2015, Elon and Demis had lunch.

Over lunch, Elon kept up his griping, effectively accusing DeepMind and Google of irresponsibility.

A month after their encounter, Elon received an email from Sam Altman.

The email he wrote to Elon said, I've been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI.

I think the answer is almost definitely not.

If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.

And you can see this as people begin to understand more and more of the importance of developing EGI.

You have all these other people that jump into this competition.

When a technology of infinite potential comes into view, there will never be a quiet consensus about who should control it.

With so much at stake, power, money, scientific glory, the future of humanity, conflict is unavoidable.

And so Demis is practical.

He knows the people he's dealing with.

He knows these kind of people are going to want to start their own thing.