Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How did Demis Hassabis' childhood shape his ambitions?
Demis is a phenomenal storyteller. I experienced this firsthand. Demis revealed himself as an extraordinary consumer and teller of stories. His outlook is shaped by novels and movies, and his gifts as a leader are bound up with his genius for narrating his experiences. When he is in full flow, ideas pour out of him in a torrent.
And this is an example, and I think this is one of the best excerpts in the book. I am first and foremost a scientist, Demis began. My goal is to understand nature, but doing science is sort of like reading the mind of God. We humans have these faculties. The world is understandable, but why should it be that way? I think there's a reason. Computers are just bits of sand and copper.
Why should these combine to do anything? I mean, it's absurd. The electrons move around and then that creates an AI system that can defeat a Go master? Why should that be possible? This is beyond evolutionary coincidence. We can build electron microscopes and interrogate reality down to the most minute level.
We can build systems that detect black holes colliding from more than a billion years ago. I mean, what is this? What the hell is going on here? I sit at my desk at 2 a.m., and I feel like reality is staring at me, screaming at me, literally screaming at me, trying to tell me something if I could just listen hard enough. That's how I feel every day. So you can see why I'm trying to build AI.
I've felt that since I was very young, that there's a deep, deep mystery about what's going on here. You can frame it however you want. You can call this God's design, or you can say it's just nature. I'm open-minded about the description, and I don't know what the answers will turn out to be.
at the moment we don't really know what time is or gravity is or any of these things so there is a mystery waiting to be solved and it encompasses just about everything i would like to understand and then i'm perfectly fine to shuffle off my mortal coil That's just incredible. And so then the author goes again, just into what kind of person Demis is.
Demis, who blazed the trail followed by his rivals, is decent and public spirited and wants the best for humanity. He has ego. He is ferociously competitive, but his goal is scientific enlightenment, not money or power. The spiritual language in which he sometimes couches his mission underscores how seriously he takes it.
So I would say definitely after I got to spend time with him, but especially after reading this book, he's the kind of passionate missionary that you just root for, that you want to see win. And so one of the reoccurring themes throughout this book is just his comfort in following his own path, making his own decisions. It says Demas himself is a figure apart.
It is not by coincidence that he has chosen to remain in London, far from Silicon Valley's hype and commotion. And so he is telling the author how important stories are to him. In fact, he said you should read one of his favorite novels, which is Ender's Game, to understand him. And there's a great overview of Demis' accomplishments before he found this book.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did DeepMind face in its early days?
That's how he is 24-7. I don't think his father meant his comment in quite the literal sense. Try your best wasn't supposed to mean try literally to the point of destroying yourself. Go absolutely completely 100%. But that's how Demis understood it. There is no 50% mode in Demis. There's not even a 99% mode in Demis. There is only 100%.
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And so that's a great overview, and I want to dig in now to his childhood about why he might be like this. He was very special from a very young age. His mother had grown up in poverty, spending part of her childhood as an orphan on the streets of Singapore. His father had been the first from his family to attend university.
His dad was an aspiring singer-songwriter and sold toys out of the family's beaten-up Volkswagen van. Luckily for Demis, he discovers chess when he's four. He has a natural aptitude for the game. He first sees his father play a game against his uncle. That causes him to want to learn how to play. Within a few weeks, he had mastered the game well enough to defeat adults. Keep in mind he was four.
By the time he's five years old, he begins competing in tournaments, sitting on a telephone book... On top of a chair so he could get his head over the table. He was relentlessly competitive. That is something that's going to be repeated over and over again. I think I heard him say one time that half his brain is dedicated to competition. He is ferociously, ferociously competitive.
And so when he is six years old, a renowned chess player and a television commentator goes up to Demas' dad and says, hey, your son is the best six-year-old chess player I have ever seen. And Demas says, what are you going to do when someone tells you that? My parents were fairly normal people living normal lives, and a renowned expert is telling you this.
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Chapter 4: How did Demis convince investors to support DeepMind?
But then he goes to this tournament and he realizes, wait a minute, I need to dedicate this colossal waste of brainpower. Maybe I should dedicate my life and energy to something more meaningful and world changing than playing a board game for the rest of my life. So he says they experienced an epiphany.
That tournament had been packed with brilliant brains dueling over a board game until stamina was drained to nothing. Surely that immense collective mental effort should have been harnessed to some higher cause, say science or medicine. I thought we were wasting our minds. And so right there and then he resolved that there must be something more. There must be a mission, a purpose.
And so something you'll see throughout his life is that all these experiences that he has, all the things that he is learning, they fit together almost like a puzzle. So he discovers this book that's called The Chess Computer Handbook. It's written by this guy named David Levy. And it says Levy introduced Demas to the themes that would animate his lifelong quest to build artificial intelligence.
The marriage of computing and chess united Demas' two worlds. He read the book in one sitting. Twelve-year-old Demas sets out applying Levy's principles. He built a computer program to play a simpler game, the game Othello. The program proved intelligent enough to beat Demas' little brother. This is what Demas said about it. It was amazing that I made something that could beat him.
And so Demas gets introduced to AI through gaming. He's reading all these gaming magazines. At this point, he's 16 years old. He gets into Cambridge, but they're saying he's too young to attend. So he's like this one-year gap. And so he's going to work out the best gaming studio in Europe. It's called Bullfrog.
And the way he gets there is he read these gaming magazines that had an ad where saying if you win this competition to create this game, the prize was a job at Bullfrog. And so this is a description of the environment there and some of his coworkers.
Demas was fascinated by the other Bullfrog employees, technically talented, self-made young men, many of whom had dropped out of high school, being too idiosyncratically gifted or plain wild to sit meekly in a classroom. The line between working and philosophizing blurred. We were brainstorming these big ideas. There was this thrill of unbridled creation.
And so the founder of Bullfrog is this guy named Peter Molyneux, and he gives Demis a life-changing book. The book is called Godel, Escher, and Bach. And then the way the book is described in this book, it says, it was a firehose of a book that inspired a remarkable number of future AI scientists. As a chess prodigy, Demis had long been curious about the workings of his own mind.
How did his brain formulate moves? Why did it make mistakes? And what was behind this phenomenon called thinking? The author of the book attacked these questions as a physicist, insisting that human intelligence and computer intelligence are virtually indistinguishable. And so he's around 16 years old at the time.
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Chapter 5: What breakthroughs did DeepMind achieve in AI?
Molyneux and the book that he gave him had planted the idea that computers would soon do whatever the brain could do. Ian Banks gave him this applied utopian vision of what AI's realization could mean, boundless human flourishing. I decided then that I was going to dedicate my career to working on AI, Demis recalled. I had already had the kernel of the idea for what eventually became DeepMind.
And so this will give you an indication of just how special Demis was. He quits Bullfrog because he wants to attend Cambridge. The founder did everything possible to persuade him not to go. He writes out a check for 500,000 pounds to get him to work on Bullfrog's next game. Keep in mind, this is a poor 17 or 18 year old at the time. He does not have money.
That amount of money would be 1.7 million in today's money. And Demis refuses. And so while at college, he's thinking about what he wants to do for his life. At some time, he gets really interested in theoretical physics. But then again, this is so important to understanding just how competitive he is.
He realizes he can't go into a career in theoretical physics and says when he signed up for a game, he liked to feel that he could win. And physics seemed like a long shot. And one of the most fascinating things about Demis is that he's insanely competitive, but unbelievably kind and nice and approachable. And so the author is struck by this and he asks him about this.
He goes, one day I asked Demis about his friendly approachability. Demis says, I've always tried to live like that. It is a very deep personal philosophy. I think it's just my personality. I want to help people. And I feel very strongly that it's really bad to manipulate or control people. And so at this point, Demis is building his worldview.
And one of the most important things is something he repeats throughout this book is that he believes that information is the fundamental unit of the universe. And so he has what's described as a two-part epiphany, something that sticks with him throughout his entire career. Number one, information was the fundamental unit of reality.
Number two, a machine that learned for itself how to induce nature's patterns was the most powerful imaginable tool with which to apprehend reality. While artificial intelligence could push the frontiers of science, it could also do much else besides that. It could discover medicines, extend the lifespan of humans, solve the obstacles to nuclear fusion, rendering energy clean and abundant.
As Demis once put it, what we are working on is potentially a meta-solution to any problem. A machine that can navigate an infinity of data would be infinite in its reach. Let's go back to this idea that his ability to think for himself, to forge his own path. You see it when he was a kid. You see it in college. He's still like this to this day.
Towards the end of his time at Cambridge, he had confided to his friends that to pursue his dream of building AI, he planned to found a company. It was a shocking idea. Entrepreneurship was a foreign concept on the Cambridge campus. Britain had no equivalent to Silicon Valley. If you'd looked at the students and asked who's going to set up a company, the answer would have been nobody.
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Chapter 6: How did the acquisition by Google impact DeepMind?
aspects of his personality, says if there was one thing that Demis hated, it was to be controlled by anyone. And this is what he said. They wanted our souls in exchange for the money. Again, this is very fascinating. We'll get to this later. But one reason that Demis sells DeepMind to Google was to avoid having to be what I think he calls it like the hamster wheel of raising money from investors.
He rightly saw that as just a giant distraction to his mission. And that leads us to another reoccurring theme throughout his life and throughout the book is just Demis is insanely practical. He also is going to learn from every single experience that he has. And so since Demas talked about starting a company, his ambition had been to build powerful AI, not just to design video games.
In founding Elixir, he was balancing his ambition against his practical side. His ultimate dream was creating a Manhattan Project for Artificial Intelligence. That metaphor, that idea, hey, we're going to create a Manhattan Project for Artificial Intelligence, that's used constantly throughout the book.
And in the middle of this, there's just a phenomenal line because I keep trying to hound the fact that Demis hates losing, that he is hyper-competitive. This is how he describes what losing feels like to him. It's like my soul is on fire. And so one way that Demis learns to be more practical is by making a mistake. He has this... He has this idea for this game called Republic.
Republic was this overly ambitious, basically technically impossible idea of a game. It's going to lead to the failure of his first company. And there's just this really great point that he makes here. Over the next couple of years, Republic's release date was pushed back repeatedly. As the keeper of the vision, Demis fought a rearguard action against compromise.
And it took time for him to recognize the trap that his own charisma created. Who would have thought that you can actually inspire people too much, he said. Well, you can because you can get to the point where you're deluding your team and then they are deluding you also.
It's like I'm making this judgment that this is possible because the engineers are telling me it's possible, but they're only telling me it's possible because I've over-inspired them, Demis said. So in fact, none of us were getting real feedback. his co-founder talks about on how to communicate and debate and really just persuade Demas.
You had to push the conversation to the point where he got more and more intense and defended his positions more and more strongly. The stronger he got, the closer you were. Then eventually he might go quiet. That's when he absorbed the message. And so after this, he's thinking about what to do. This is right before he found DeepMind.
And the author does a great job of describing, again, just how he's learning from everything and how all these experiences fit together. I marveled how Demis' experience and ideas appear to slot together. His curiosity about physics has spurred him to work on AI, the ultimate tool to unlock science. His curiosity about AI had led him to investigate the human brain.
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Chapter 7: What competitive strategies did DeepMind adopt against rivals?
Rather than building the digital equivalent of a house, DeepMind aspired to build a city. And so Demis and one of his co-founders, there's three co-founders, it's Demis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleiman. And so Demis and Mustafa are out trying to raise money. There's just so many bizarre stories in the book.
I've heard so many investor horror stories from founders, most of which are not repeated publicly, unfortunately. Let's just say there's just a lot of creeps and weirdos out there. So when I got to this section, my note was very simple. WTF. It says, in September 2010, Demis and Mustafa appeared before a strange kind of investment committee.
David Gammon declared himself ready to commit capital, but he'd only go forward if DeepMind did things his way. Entrepreneurs seeking his support were required to visit his home and pitch to Gammon, his wife, and his three teenage sons. Each family member would get an equal say on whether to invest. I said to Demis, if you can't explain this to my younger son, you're not going to get his vote.
There was a painfully large gap between the grand science of the DeepMind business plan and an invitation to chat with a middle schooler. That is just flat out bizarre. So eventually, Demis raises money from Peter Thiel. There's some interesting background here that I think you'd be interested in. As a general matter, Peter Thiel doubted that going on boards was a good use of his partner's time.
Startups should be left to sink or swim. The art of venture capital, he liked to say, was to back contrarian ideas, not coach company founders. Thiel had taken the unusual position that collective decision making should be avoided. The way he saw things, if investments were chosen based on voting, the Founders Fund portfolio would consist of middle-of-the-road startups to which nobody objected.
Given that all the profits in venture come from a few improbable moonshots, this sort of consensus portfolio would deliver mediocre performance. Founders Fund wired $2.3 million. This gives you an idea of just how hard it was to raise money for his idea, for Demis' idea. Founders Fund wired $2.3 million to DeepMind, and they assumed ownership of a bit less than half the company.
There was no other capital available. This is December 2010. Peter Thiel reappears over and over again in the story. He actually has one of my all-time favorite quotes. It's in his book, Zero to One. It says, And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. That is exactly what my partner, Apple Oven, has done with their new advertising platform, Axon.
Axon is the most powerful advertising platform in a generation. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention. Axon ads are full screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. Retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. You can launch on Axon in minutes. You set the goal and Axon achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed and Axon scales quickly.
They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increase their revenue by millions. And most advertisers aren't even thinking about this channel yet. Less than 1% of advertisers have access to Axon.
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Chapter 8: What is Demis Hassabis' vision for the future of AI?
And so one of the first things they do, I think this is really important. The fact that this to me is really the power of biography because you see that you see the evolution of their thinking and their behavior over time. He is learning. He's learning from his failed experiment with his previous company.
So DeepMind, what they want to do is they're trying to create an agent that can make plans and achieve goals in multiple environments. And so they start out on what they think is the perfect environment for testing an agent. All the video games that were designed in the 1970s and 80s by Atari. And this is why.
Given the primitive state of video graphics in that era, the computing power required to crack Atari would be affordable. Given that Atari had released dozens of games, an agent would have plenty of opportunities to prove it could be general. Given that most Atari games featured a constantly updating score, the agent would have the feedback it needed to learn how to play better.
Demis had grown since his experience with Elixir. In both cases, Demis had announced a maximalist ambition, but in the case of DeepMind, he had also figured out a ladder that led to his destination. At Elixir, he had plunged his company straight into making the most complex video game ever, and that overreach had doomed the project.
At DeepMind, the ultimate goal was even grander, but Demis had let people tinker while he was building out the scientific team, not setting a demanding goal for them. And then once the team was assembled, Demis had shown exquisite judgment. and all the while he's preaching his vision, his mission.
The way Demis saw things, true general intelligence would make almost anything possible, surpassing the internet, the printing press, or even the industrial revolution in importance. But he has that combination of grand ambition and pragmatism. His schedule captured the two sides of Demis' persona.
When he stayed awake into the small hours of the morning, reading and thinking and dreaming, he reveled in his maximalist ambition. So his schedule was something like at 10 p.m. till like 4 in the morning. That's when he's doing this. And he goes to sleep for a few hours and he goes to the office.
When he goes to the office, it says when he arrived at the office the next day, he focused on getting to the next rung of the ladder. Again, this combination of grand ambition and pragmatism. Now, there's a bunch of other characters in the book, some of the most successful and wealthiest people in the world. Elon Musk is in all over this book.
Larry Page, obviously founder of Google, buys DeepMind all over this book. And so there's a ton of interesting stories and anecdotes in the book. I just want to pull out one of them. Luke Nosek was the investor at Founders Fund that wanted to make the DeepMind investment. So Luke Nosek flew back to California on Elon's private jet accompanied by Larry Page.
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