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
Somebody would say, you know, we're in for X amount, and then they'd renege.
And again, I think this just pushes Demis back into choosing Google.
DeepMind's near-death experience forced Demis to come to terms with the fact that Blue Sky Research was a poor fit for venture capital.
It was time to find a new backer.
And so he describes why he sold to Google and he describes Larry Page's pitch to him, which I thought was interesting.
Demis's goal was to create AGI.
So why bother with the idea of an independent deep mind?
Google was the obvious place to realize his ambition.
Why don't you take advantage of what I've already created, Larry Page asked Demis.
It was a recruitment pitch that he'd used successfully on other startup founders.
He was basically telling me, maybe you could build a company like Google, but it would take the best part of your career.
If my real mission was to build AGI, then why don't I use all the resources that he's accumulated?
I thought that was a pretty good argument.
Would I be happier looking back on building a multi-billion dollar company or helping solve intelligence?
It was an easy choice.
When we went on that walk together, I felt he would have taken his own offer.
The contrast with DeepMind's venture capital backers was obvious.
Demis had struggled to persuade Founders Fund that DeepMind would end up changing every widget in the world.
With Page, he didn't even have to make the argument.
I was fed up with scrambling around trying to justify what I knew was the biggest thing of all time, Demis recalled.
Showing 1001–1020 of 3,420 · page 51 of 171
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