Demis Hassabis

And so you and I have talked about that Demis is fiercely independent.

He's this outlier doing things his own way.

And at certain times that could be a strength and at certain times it could be a weakness.

At this point in the story, OpenAI gets ahead of DeepMind, even though it was founded much later.

And the book goes into detail about the two different paths that they're taking at the moment.

But I think the author describes how understanding Demis's personality and his life history could have accounted for him to make this mistake.

And so he says, at some point in this period, DeepMind should have pivoted to language models, just as OpenAI did.

But DeepMind was too excited by its own research.

It was accustomed to being the world's top AI lab.

It could scarcely imagine that a copycat outfit might overtake it.

Besides, Demis rebelled against the prospect of following OpenAI's example.

All of his life he had beaten his own path.

His obsessive childhood chess, his underage moonlighting for Bullfrog, his precocious impatience with the AI skeptical consensus at Cambridge, his un-British appetite for entrepreneurship, his improbable leap from game design to neuroscience.

Demis was far more original and far more of a contrarian than most of the self-identified contrarians of Silicon Valley.

And then one of my favorite maxims is that actions express priority.

So we see what's important to Demis by looking at his actions.

Since he was in college, he was obsessed with this idea of trying to solve protein folding.

Again, this is what he's going to win the Nobel Prize for.

And at this point in the story, he thinks that AI has progressed sufficiently to solve this problem for the first time in human history.

And it talks about why this is so important.