#416 The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis
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What drives Demis Hassabis in his quest for AGI?
He was caught up in a terrifying capitalistic contest and he relished it. This is the most crazy, ferocious corporate battle that we've ever seen, he said. I can't imagine it being any more intense, but I'm doing it my way. I'm a weird British outlier on this little island here, and I've made my own path. I've followed my passions and tried to stay true to what I believe in, and I'm going to carry on doing that. This is my mission, so I will do it 100%. It is literally just the first level of what's coming. This is a paradoxical moment, which I guess is sort of messing with my mind. It should feel amazing, realizing all these dreams that we've had for more than 15 years. But it doesn't feel like how I imagined it would feel.
The way it's going is this mad rush. I've had to make my peace with that, recognize that it's going to be messy, and I'll just have to do my best, and maybe we, being the world, will muddle through somehow. I'm optimistic still. That excerpt is from the end of the book I'm going to talk about today, which is The Infinity Machine, Demis Hassabis' Deep Mind and the Quest for Superintelligence, and it was written by Sebastian Malaby. The publisher was nice to send me an advanced copy. And by the time you hear this episode, this book will be available to buy. And I think that ending of the book is the perfect place to begin this episode. And so I want to jump right into the introduction. There's a bunch of highlights I have from the introduction and from the first chapter I think will give you a good overview of what I want to talk to you about today.
So it says this book is about intelligence. On the one hand, it's a portrait of a remarkable human, a chess prodigy, a Nobel laureate, a polymathic thinker. On the other hand, it tells the stories of its quest to build remarkable machines, systems that are intuitive, creative, and even original. And so even though Demis is in the greatest competition of his life, one that he is built for, one that he is relishing, he gave the author an unbelievable amount of his time, and this is why. Believing that societies will never trust inventors of transformational technologies unless they understand what makes them tick, Demas agreed to the deep access I needed. And so then the author, Sebastian, talks about some of the personality traits that Demas has.
It says Demas came across as phenomenally articulate. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with Demas, and that is exactly how I would describe him. He is phenomenally articulate. And one of the things that is obvious if you read the book and one of the things that jumped out when you study him is he is a missionary. It's one of the things I most admire about him. He has been talking about this mission for a decade and a half before it has basically consumed our entire world. And so the introduction pulls out some of these ideas that he's been repeating for a very long time. Intelligence is fundamental. It is the root of all else. It is the mechanism through which humans perceive reality.
It's the mind that creates our reality around us, Demis said. Richard Feynman said, what I cannot build, I do not understand. Following Feynman's dictum, in order to grasp human intelligence, scientists would have to build an artificial analog, a machine that mimicked human thinking. This next sentence is very important. AI's practical or profit-making potential was a secondary concern. Damas was delivering this sort of talk repeatedly at tech gatherings in the 2010s. The boyish philosopher on stage was clearly not a stereotypical entrepreneur peddling a hot app that promised untold riches. And then if you think about that excerpt that appears at the end of the book that he's like, you know, I'm this weird British outlier and I'm just trying to follow my own path and following my passions and staying true to what I believe in.
Founding a company to build AGI back in 2010 was viewed by others as ridiculous, as laughable. When they founded DeepMind in 2010, fellow scientists had rolled their eyes, believing the construction of human-like AI to be impossible.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What drives Demis Hassabis in his quest for AGI?
0:00–5:20
2
How did Demis Hassabis' childhood shape his ambitions?
5:20–10:38
3
What challenges did DeepMind face in its early days?
10:38–15:10
4
How did Demis convince investors to support DeepMind?
15:10–18:14
5
What breakthroughs did DeepMind achieve in AI?
18:14–21:51
6
How did the acquisition by Google impact DeepMind?
21:51–27:40
7
What competitive strategies did DeepMind adopt against rivals?
27:40–32:58
8
What is Demis Hassabis' vision for the future of AI?
32:58–54:39