Demis Hassabis

“The only way I could know is if I basically push myself to the point just before death, because that is literally when you've done your best. If you die, and by die, I mean burnout or something, then you've slightly overdone it. It's like running a marathon. Y…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“The analogy here is the internet has been for AI what coal and oil were for the industrial revolution. You could just literally drill a hole in the ground and get black gold. Today, we can just download all of the internet. Neither of these resources had to be…”

“Less than two years after the messy shotgun marriage that created Google DeepMind, Demis' team had closed the technical gap.”

“So in 2024, Demis and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for protein structure prediction.”