Demis Hassabis
speaker
3,420 appearances
27 recordings
18 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 7 Jul
Demis Hassabis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 16.
Appearances
Demis had what we called a Jedi mind trick.
He would kind of be like, you will believe the things I'm going to say, and then people did believe them.
And so his first idea is to start this gaming company called Elixir.
Like he said before, games were his path into AI.
He has all kinds of trouble now and later with venture capitalists.
At this point, they said they'll give him some money, but you have to give up more than half the equity of the company.
And the reason I bring this out to you is because I think this is one of the most pronounced
aspects of his personality, says if there was one thing that Demis hated, it was to be controlled by anyone.
And this is what he said.
They wanted our souls in exchange for the money.
Again, this is very fascinating.
We'll get to this later.
But one reason that Demis sells DeepMind to Google was to avoid having to be what I think he calls it like the hamster wheel of raising money from investors.
He rightly saw that as just a giant distraction to his mission.
And that leads us to another reoccurring theme throughout his life and throughout the book is just Demis is insanely practical.
He also is going to learn from every single experience that he has.
And so since Demas talked about starting a company, his ambition had been to build powerful AI, not just to design video games.
In founding Elixir, he was balancing his ambition against his practical side.
His ultimate dream was creating a Manhattan Project for Artificial Intelligence.
That metaphor, that idea, hey, we're going to create a Manhattan Project for Artificial Intelligence, that's used constantly throughout the book.
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