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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 16.

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Founders · #416 The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis · 1 Apr 2026 podcast

Now back to this flight that Larry Page and Elon and Luke Nosek are on.

I think this is how Larry Page found out about DeepMind.

So Elon says, there's only one AI company that I think is going to work.

I'm an investor in that company, DeepMind.

Now let's go back to another character, Peter Thiel.

A lot of this book at this part of the story, it's just a lot of back and forth and ups and downs in raising money.

Keep that in mind because everybody criticizes Demis for selling to Google.

But if you were going through what he was going through, he saw as a giant distraction and he needed a backer with essentially unlimited resources.

But there's just some interesting stories about how these other players on the board were viewing Demis.

Peter Thiel barely saw the deep mind team, and he felt instinctively suspicious of a fellow chess player.

A man who had spent his formative years mentally crushing opponents should be treated with caution, Theo reckoned.

And so while these ups and downs and this painful fundraising process is going on, Demas gets this email from Google, and he's willing to meet with him.

This is why, given his testy relationship with his venture capital backers, he was eager.

A deep-pocketed parent company could free him from the endless fundraising negotiations that cluttered his life and pulled his attention away from DeepMind's research.

I was having these inane conversations nonstop with investors.

I felt my brain was atrophying.

I'm talking about the biggest invention ever, and they keep coming back to where's the widget.

And I'm like, I'm going to revolutionize all widgets so I can pick you a random widget if you want me to.

But you obviously haven't gotten the point if you're asking me this.

And so the fundraising was so bad, at one point they almost ran out of money.

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