Demis Hassabis

He says you definitely can't crack a hard problem if the person leading the team thinks it's not possible.

And so one example of what the miracles that AI could offer is what they did with AlphaFold.

Hundreds of academic scientists had spent decades on protein folding.

How was it that the DeepMinds team, numbering perhaps 20 at its peak, had defeated all of them?

And so then the book gets into the invention of ChatGPT, and this is where Demis realizes he's in a fight for his life.

This is war.

It says, the night before ChatGPT's release, OpenAI's team placed bets on how many people might try the tool by the end of the weekend.

Some guessed a few thousand.

Others guessed tens of thousands.

To be safe, the company readied enough server capacity for 100,000 users.

Within five days, they collected a million users.

Within two months, it had amassed an astonishing 100 million users.

making it the fastest growing consumer application ever.

This is Demis's response.

And again, he is pathological.

The way he was described in the book by somebody else is pathologically competitive.

At the end of April 2023, I visited Demis and asked how he was feeling.

This is wartime, he answered.

OpenA and Microsoft have literally parked the tanks on the lawn.

And so Demas also spends time thinking about the motivations of the people that he's competing with.