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
But DeepMind was too excited by its own research.
It was accustomed to being the world's top AI lab.
It could scarcely imagine that a copycat outfit might overtake it.
Besides, Demis rebelled against the prospect of following OpenAI's example.
All of his life he had beaten his own path.
His obsessive childhood chess, his underage moonlighting for Bullfrog, his precocious impatience with the AI skeptical consensus at Cambridge, his un-British appetite for entrepreneurship, his improbable leap from game design to neuroscience.
Demis was far more original and far more of a contrarian than most of the self-identified contrarians of Silicon Valley.
And then one of my favorite maxims is that actions express priority.
So we see what's important to Demis by looking at his actions.
Since he was in college, he was obsessed with this idea of trying to solve protein folding.
Again, this is what he's going to win the Nobel Prize for.
And at this point in the story, he thinks that AI has progressed sufficiently to solve this problem for the first time in human history.
And it talks about why this is so important.
Proteins are the building blocks of life.
They provide the structure and also the function of organs and muscles, hormones and hair, blood and brain cells.
The idea of solving protein folding or predicting the complex shapes that proteins assume was both fascinating in its own right and almost certain to unlock medical advances.
Knowing the structure of proteins would help researchers to come up with drug molecules that could bind to their surfaces.
Knowing how those structures formed might unlock cures for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, since both diseases were thought to be linked to incorrectly folded proteins.
And when they wind up solving this, they make the technology and all their research free to the world.
And when DeepMind's project was completed, the company gifted its results to science, allowing researchers all over the world to make free use of its discovery.
Showing 1141–1160 of 3,420 · page 58 of 171
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