Madhumita Murgia

DeepMind hadn't bet on the LLM approach.

You know, Demis didn't really believe that you could get to AGI by, you know, ingesting the internet and figuring out patterns in language.

He just didn't believe that that represented human intelligence.

It turned out, actually, you know, LLMs were a much better way of sort of mimicking intelligence than he had previously expected.

I heard him talking about this publicly recently.

Somebody asked him, you know, how did you feel?

It's been your life's work to develop AGI and to kind of lead in this area.

And yet, open AI, you know, this little lab came and kind of ate your lunch and they put chat GPT out there.

How do you feel about it?

And he said, you know, for me, that was war.

They came and parked their tanks on my lawn and I'm going to war.

No, I think it's a legitimate question, right?

Because as Stephen has laid out, there is no reason why Google isn't winning right now.

They had everything in place, not just now with their cash reserves and the stack and the chips and the brains and the talent and Demis Hassabis, you know, their...

secret weapon.

The fact that they also invented the transformer back in 2017, which is the technology at the heart of this entire revolution that we're seeing, these large language models.

But they've lost every single person of the seven co-authors who wrote that paper to other companies, including OpenAI and elsewhere.

And now we're at a point where there's an entirely new market that's been created by these upstart competitors.

You've got Anthropic and OpenAI who've opened up entirely new applications.

And I think the bare case there is, you know, so far they've shown that they've sort of incubated talent and then lost all of that talent to build these new companies.