Madhumita Murgia

He had to really pitch for it and convince people.

And the money he did get was people who were sort of doing counterintuitive bets because, you know, they wanted to be contrarian, not because they believed this was going to be big.

So it's just a look at his story shows you a little bit about the trajectory of AI in such a short time, over a decade.

And when he sold to Google, from Demis' perspective, he said this many times, he felt that he needed the compute power in order to do his work in peace.

He just didn't want to spend his brain energy pitching for money and thinking about how he was going to fund this work of building an artificial intelligence that was going to solve all humanity's problems.

And Google felt like the answer to that.

The first was called AlphaGo.

And this was essentially an AI system that learned to play Go, which is this fiendishly complicated Chinese board game supposed to be, you know, exponentially harder than chess.

And for a long time, it had been like a problem that was uncrackable by machines.

And the crowning achievement of that was a machine which they kind of put to the test in Korea against the human Go champion called Lee Sedol.

And I went out to Korea actually to watch this game.

And it was kind of amazing to watch the human champion be defeated by this AI system for the first time.

So that was the first breakthrough.

And then the second one which built on that was AlphaFold, for which Demis and his team won a Nobel Prize for.

And essentially, this was using the same techniques to sort of predict all the different ways in which proteins could fold.

And that led to amazing breakthroughs in biology and biochemistry, allowing people to generate proteins much more quickly, proteins being the substrate of life.

It's also dramatically different, isn't it, Stephen, to like five years ago, even when they evaluated their impact by their publications.

I remember when I was covering it, you know, five, six years ago, the PR would be, we're in nature, we're in science.

You know, they were so proud of their publications.

And then that quietly went down.