DeepMind

“In late, late, when we were starting OpenAI, there were very few AGI efforts in the world. There was DeepMind, one or two others that I can think of. It was like a very non-consensus thing to do.”

“So I think actually people's interest in doing life science is one third TAM expansion and two thirds, shit, I'm putting everyone at a job. The least I can do is keep them alive. I want to do good because I want to have meaning. It's the search for meaning and…”

“One of the advantages Google has is that their TPU can be designed in collaboration with the team building Gemini or the team of DeepMind, and so they can inform their choices back and forth, and that's an enormously powerful thing that is surprisingly relativ…”

“AlphaGo running on GPUs had an ELO score of about 3200. Lease it all was about 35, 35 50. And I might be getting the first digit wrong. It might be 2000 instead of 3000. But like, you know, it was more than 200. And then when put on on TPUs, it actually went t…”

“Sold half the company at five million posts as one of the most elite technologists in the entire world.”

“I mean, what's worse is the paper is actually not even being Published anymore because there's a six month embargo inside of DeepMind, right? Like we've heard about this where a paper comes out and then I think there's a six month embargo window where if anybo…”

“And then DeepMind was much more top down where Demis just had this vision of, okay, we're going to create AGI. Here's all the things that I think are required. And so they kind of had this tech tree of how they were going to do it. And then let's have all thes…”

“And I think our approach is a bit more inspired by the DeepMind one, just because I think because we're in a vertical, the end goal is very clear.”

“I think that it's going to be difficult to change because there's just so many strong network effects around talent, right? When we have the best talent, even I know so many Brilliant French researchers that go to work at OpenAI and dropping in DeepMind, right…”

“Multi-billion dollar companies being created and invested in by DeepMind.”

“In other words, for us, for let's say our TPUs, we co-design them with a building. We co-design them with the power generation source. We co-design them with the DeepMind team that builds Gemini models. So it's the software above, the models above that, the ch…”

“Facebook offered more money, but I wanted somebody who really understood why AI would be bigger than all those things. And then he sold to Google.”

“I would say about 90% of the breakthroughs that underpin the modern AI industry were done either by Google Brain or Google Research or DeepMind, so one of our groups.”

“We used to do this extrapolation of compute and algorithmic progress, and basically we predicted around 20 years it would take from when we started out, and I think we're pretty much on track.”

“And I felt that there was actually less competition here for that sort of talent. And we could even draw in the best talent from the top European universities. And that's what it was like in the early days of DeepMind. So I think it was a huge structural advan…”

“And I think that certainly was missing 10 years ago when I was doing fundraising for deep mind and I think it's still kind of missing today. Just that kind of level of ambition and the amount the capital markets can support.”

“In 2016, DeepMind solved a grand challenge in computer science, creating a system that surpassed the intuitive brilliance of the world's best players of the ancient board game Go.”

“In 2020, DeepMind solved a second grand challenge in biochemistry, stitching together 32 algorithms to define the shape of nearly all the proteins in nature.”

“Like Ender, Demis has dedicated every fiber of his being to the accomplishment of a mission, which is why he worked night shifts from 10 in the evening until four in the morning, in addition to his normal office hours.”

“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.”

“If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence so machines can learn, that would be worth 10 Microsofts.”

“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 vis…”

“Founders fund wired 2.3 million to deep mine and they assumed ownership of a bit less than half the company. There was no other capital available. This is December, 2010.”

“The culture of academia could be both boringly cautious and terrifyingly competitive. Boring because it pursued incremental advances. Terrifying because scientists cut each other's throats To be the first to publish.”

“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 A…”

“Google bought DeepMind for six hundred and fifty million dollars. Demis netted one hundred and thirty six million dollars.”

“Not long after the Google acquisition, DeepMind was paying two hundred and sixty million dollars in staff costs annually, six times more. Then it's total spending during its first three years of existence.”

“People that worked at DeepMind could get into any Google office globally, but people that worked at Google were barred from DeepMind's premises.”

“In some weeks, a single research team at DeepMind Might gobble up more computational resources than Google's worldwide Gmail network, which had nine hundred million users.”

“If you have powerful people who are able to understand the impact of the technology, they're not just going to sit on the sidelines. They won't be content to just be your advisors. So obviously what was going on was our supposed advisors were really our rivals…”

“At some point in this period, DeepMind should have pivoted to language models. Just as OpenAI did, but DeepMind was too excited by its own research. It was accustomed to being the world's top AI lab. It could scarcely imagine that a copycat outfit might overta…”

“And when DeepMind's project was completed, the company gifted its results to science, allowing researchers all over the world to make free use of its discovery.”

“He tried to absorb DeepMind into Tesla in 2014, then OpenAI in 2018.”

“Would probably put my money today on Larry Page quarter trillion. Google, Google, or should say Alphabet has like woken up. They own, you know, close to a hundred percent of search. They own a hundred percent of deep mind. They own like mid teens percentage of…”

“I actually wrote a one-page memo saying we were being stupid by fragmenting our resources. So in particular at the time we had you know efforts within Google research on and in the brain team in particular on large language models. We also had efforts on multi…”

“They had, you know, similar funding to DeepMind, probably more actually.”

“Two very well-resourced groups. They both tried different ideas, and the machine learning on experimental data beat out first principles simulation by You know, a very large margin.”

“DeepMind got bought by Google, and DeepMind is basically Google's AI play, and the DeepMind team, which was basically a research team that was building AI, is the reason that OpenAI exists. It is the reason that ChatGPT exists. It is the reason Elon is interes…”

“Thiel backs, Thiel becomes the first backer of DeepMind.”

“The second backer, I think, the second significant backer was Elon Musk. So Thiel tells Elon about this. Elon meets Demis. Demis says that, that big dog line of basically like, I'm working on the most important thing in the world. Elon, you know, is like, wait…”

“So they bought it for, I think, four hundred million pounds, so it was like, you know, 500 something million dollars”

“They end up getting 90% prediction accuracy, and they basically solve the single protein folding question.”

“And this company, by the way, their first round of funding was six hundred million dollars to, as they spun it out of Google and DeepMind”

“They folded two hundred million plus, basically every known protein in existence, and they made it available.”

“Meta, you know, they were so early on AI, they tried to acquire DeepMind, you know, before Google did and then sort of just lost focus on it.”

“I think we will be able to make some large scientific discoveries in the next few years.”

“I believe so. There's groups doing research on the model architecture side, for sure, within Google and within DeepMind”

“And at the time we had to add this from real world data to the name of the project, because people would assume otherwise it would be synthetic environments or synthetic data. And that definitely has shifted completely since then.”

“Google's Gemini is a reference to two formerly distinct labs, Google brain and deep mind that were merged into one lab, Google deep mind.”

“I showed him some stuff from Deep, from DeepMind, and I think that's how he found out about it and acquired them, actually.”

“And, you know, we saw gold medals on the International Math Olympiad by a couple of labs, including OpenAI and DeepMind.”

“And so DeepMind has shown that you can integrate this kind of reasoning model to sort of decipher new targets for disease, new mechanisms that were actually also proven in a wet lab scenario post facto.”

“There's a rumor that the Navier-Stokes equation is going to be solved by DeepMind, which would be huge.”

“DeepMind, baby. They are the fourth bidder in a four-way auction for DNN Research.”

“They bought this thing for, we'll talk about the purchase price, but it's worth, what, five hundred billion dollars today? I mean, this is as good as Instagram or YouTube in terms of greatest acquisitions of all time.”

“This company and this purchase of it by Google was the butterfly flapping its wings equivalent moment that directly leads to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Anthropic, and basically everything.”

“Founders Fund leads DeepMind's seed round of about two million dollars.”

“He immediately calls up Demis and says, I will buy the company right now with Tesla stock. This is late 2013, like, early 2014. Tesla's market cap is about twenty billion dollars.”

“This is an asset that Google owns today that, again, I think is worth half a trillion dollars if it's independent.”

“Very quickly, July of 20 16, Google announces a 40% reduction in the energy required to cool data centers.”