215. The Biography Of Demis Hassabis

Brian McCullough (0:00)

Hey, everybody, this is an emergency podcast episode that I recorded via my day job, the Tech Brew Ride Home podcast. But since this is the most I've ever done about the history of AI, I wanted to throw this up here as well. So get ready for a deep biography of the life of Demis Hassabis.

Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Brew Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough, as always. Today we're going to talk to someone that I actually spoke to about a decade ago. He's one of my favorite authors. I've read almost everything he's written. We're talking to Sebastian Mallaby, and we are talking about this book, The Infinity Machine, Demis Hassabis, and The Deep Mind, The Quest for Superintelligence.

Sebastian Mallaby (0:51)

Welcome. Thank you so much.

Brian McCullough (0:53)

So let me start this way. For people not ensconced deeply in the AI world, people know Sam Altman, increasingly Darya Amadai. Can you, in that sort of firmament of AI superstars or gurus, if you will, where does Demis fit into this?

Sebastian Mallaby (1:14)

Sure, there's some contrast here, right? So Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford. Demis Hassabis has a PhD and a Nobel Prize. It's a different level of scientific focus. I think, you know, Sam Altman may be the greatest fundraiser in Silicon Valley history. Demis Hassabis is a breakthrough scientist. So that's one big contrast. Dari Amadei is also a PhD scientist and I think is the closest of the other AI leaders to be compared to Demis Hassabis. Maybe the difference is that Demis had this conviction in the importance of artificial intelligence in the mid 1990s, right, when he was still in his teens and he was convinced that he was going to build an AI company, bring powerful AI into the world, you know, 15 years before AI could even recognize the photograph of a cat, like nothing in AI was working. And he had this super early conviction, which is pretty much unique in the field.

Brian McCullough (2:10)

But he is a different generation than, say, the Jeffrey Hinton's or like Mustafa Salman is maybe also of his sort of cohort, right?

Sebastian Mallaby (2:19)

Yeah, Jeff Hinton is older. Jeff Hinton was working as a professor on deep learning back in the 80s. In fact, I know one of his first graduate students from that period. So he has the longest roots, but he is a professor. He is not a scientist entrepreneur. And Demis Hassabis not only did science, but he also created this company out of nothing. I mean, how do you raise money when it's 2010? And you're going around saying, I've got this idea, deep mind. And people are like, well, what's the product? And he says, there is no product, you know, not for the next 10 years plus, there will be no product. But you should still back me because this is going to be the most important invention in human history, no less. And he had the conviction and also the persuasiveness to do that. Jeff Hinton, none of that.

Brian McCullough (3:06)

Right, stays in the research side. So that's important framing that he's sort of straddling the fence here in terms of the entrepreneur and the research. The book sort of functions as obviously a profile of him specifically, but of these people who have this conviction that AI is a technology that could be the most important technology ever, right? And it's almost a profile of that mindset, I would argue.

So you kind of open the book with Jeff Hinton's admission that the prospect of discovery is almost too sweet not to pursue it, even if all of these folks seemingly have concerns, some of them deep-seated fears about where this might go. They almost, the intellectual challenge is too much. Why did you start with like that sort of framing?

Sebastian Mallaby (3:58)

Well, I always wanted to capture a sense of what it's like to have your hands on the 21st century version of nuclear technology, right? This has got enormous upside, AI is very exciting, but it's also dangerous. And what does it feel like to be bringing something into the world that could actually destroy humans or many of them? I mean, why do people do that? It's risky and yet they go ahead. And I think the Oppenheimer comment, because Jeff Fintan was quoting Robert Oppenheimer, that when technology is sweet, you go ahead and invent it and you worry about the consequences afterwards. The extraordinary thing is I thought as I began the project, I would have to raise this point delicately with people. Maybe they didn't want to be reminded that they were doing something essentially risky, but they bring it up themselves, right? Sam Altman shares a birthday with Robert Oppenheimer. And instead of keeping that quiet, he advertises it to people in interviews. Demis Hassabis, I was talking to him once about the setting up of his first office, Deep Mind's first office in Russell Square in London, in the heart near the British Museum, near University College London. I said, what was it like? And as a writer, I know that when you ask somebody to recapture the emotion of 15 years ago, they often go, yeah, it was cool. But Demis is such a storyteller, he's so vivid in his conjuring of what his journey has been, that he said to me, okay, so you come down the stairs of my office, it was in the attic, ding, ding, ding, ding, down the stairs, there's no elevator inside, you come out, there's the square in front of you, the green trees. And on the right, three doors down, Sebastian, there was the London Mathematical Society, where Turing invented the origins of artificial intelligence. And beyond that, do you know what there was? There was that black-white, black-white level crossing across the road on the corner. And that is where the Hungarian nuclear scientist, Seilhard, in the 1930s came up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction.