Demis Hassabis

And I think this is really important.

I think Steve Jobs put it best.

Steve said, the older I get, the more I'm convinced that motives make so much difference.

Steve would use HP as his North Star example, that their primary goal back when the founders were running it, obviously, that their primary goal was to make great products, not be the biggest or the richest.

And that distinction to Jobs wasn't cosmetic.

It was foundational.

And so Demas is talking about Sam Altman.

And it says, Demas recalled what Paul Graham wrote.

Paul Graham was one of Altman's closest professional mentors.

And Paul wrote,

Demis was not just furious, he was ferociously competitive.

And so this is the response to OpenAI and ChatGPT that they do.

Larry Page insisted that Google should do everything conceivable to catch up, otherwise it would be nowhere.

Demis set about preparing his troops to think differently.

He declared that DeepMind's broad portfolio of blue sky research bets would have to be pared back.

The company would stop publishing mission-critical research that competitors could copy.

It would focus on engineering and not just science.

Researchers would have to make the mental shift from peacetime to wartime.

They also planned to merge Google Brain and DeepMind.

Not even Google could afford the luxury of duplicate research teams.