Demis Hassabis

And we don't really know, systems clearly can't do that.

And we're not quite sure what that mechanism would be, this kind of leap of imagination, like Einstein had when he came up with special relativity and then general relativity with the knowledge he had at the time.

That sweet spot.

of basically advancing the science and splitting the hypothesis space into two, ideally, whether if it's true or not true, you've learned something really useful.

And that's hard.

And making something that's also falsifiable and within the technologies that you currently have available.

So it's a very creative process, actually, highly creative process that I think just a kind of naive search on top of a model won't be enough for that.

That's right.

So when you do like, you know, real blue sky research, there's no such thing as failure, really, as long as you're picking experiments and hypotheses that meaningfully split the hypothesis space.

So, you know, and you learn something, you can learn something kind of equally valuable from an experiment that doesn't work.

That should tell you if you've designed the experiment well and your hypotheses are interesting, it should tell you a lot about where to go next.

And then you're effectively doing a search process and using that information in very helpful ways.

Yeah.

So what I've tried to do throughout my career is I have these really grand dreams and then I try to, as you've noticed, and then I try to break, but I try to break them down.

It's easy to have a kind of a crazy ambitious dream, but the trick is how do you break it down into manageable, achievable interim steps that are meaningful and useful in their own right?

And so virtual cell, which is what I call the project of modeling a cell, I've had this idea of wanting to do that for maybe more like 25 years.

And I used to talk with Paul Nurse, who is a bit of a mentor of mine in biology.

He founded the Crick Institute and won the Nobel Prize in 2001.

We've been talking about it since before in the 90s.

And I come...