Demis Hassabis

All team members poured their energies into improving one single model.

Next, they embraced meritocracy.

Any team member was welcome to propose an improvement to the model and test it.

If the upgrade boosted performance, it was added to the master code on which everyone was building.

Seniority, force of personality, dazzling theoretical claims as to why something should work, none of that affected what went into the program.

Only measurement mattered.

And so since Demis is running all of Google's AI, he says, the project is so big that I don't code anymore.

I don't design things directly.

So my skills are more about holding a hundred different projects in my mind.

Context switching between complicated things with negative minutes of time between.

Laying out division.

Picking the right intermediate targets on the way to the big goal and nurturing people to take things on.

The word I'm using the most is relentless.

Relentless progress.

Relentless shipping.

A relentless production machine for innovation.

Less than two years after the messy shotgun marriage that created Google DeepMind, Demis' team had closed the technical gap.

It was a considerable achievement.

And so they talk about where they see this going.

Humans are forever conceiving long-term objectives and planning what they need to do next week and next month in order to realize them.