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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 16.
Appearances
He is learning.
He's learning from his failed experiment with his previous company.
So DeepMind, what they want to do is they're trying to create an agent that can make plans and achieve goals in multiple environments.
And so they start out on what they think is the perfect environment for testing an agent.
All the video games that were designed in the 1970s and 80s by Atari.
And this is why.
Given the primitive state of video graphics in that era, the computing power required to crack Atari would be affordable.
Given that Atari had released dozens of games, an agent would have plenty of opportunities to prove it could be general.
Given that most Atari games featured a constantly updating score, the agent would have the feedback it needed to learn how to play better.
Demis had grown since his experience with Elixir.
In both cases, Demis had announced a maximalist ambition, but in the case of DeepMind, he had also figured out a ladder that led to his destination.
At Elixir, he had plunged his company straight into making the most complex video game ever, and that overreach had doomed the project.
At DeepMind, the ultimate goal was even grander, but Demis had let people tinker while he was building out the scientific team, not setting a demanding goal for them.
And then once the team was assembled, Demis had shown exquisite judgment.
and all the while he's preaching his vision, his mission.
The way Demis saw things, true general intelligence would make almost anything possible, surpassing the internet, the printing press, or even the industrial revolution in importance.
But he has that combination of grand ambition and pragmatism.
His schedule captured the two sides of Demis' persona.
When he stayed awake into the small hours of the morning, reading and thinking and dreaming, he reveled in his maximalist ambition.
So his schedule was something like at 10 p.m.
Showing 941–960 of 3,420 · page 48 of 171
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