#416 The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis

**David Senra** (0:00)
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 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 that I'm going to talk about today, which is The Infinity Machine, Demis Asabas' Deep Mind and the Quest for Super Intelligence, and it was written by Sebastian Mallaby. The publisher was nice to send me an advance 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 it 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, Demis agreed to the deep access I needed. And so then the author, Sebastian, talks about some of the personality traits that Demis has. Says Demis came across as phenomenally articulate. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with Demis. And that's 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 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. Damis 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 extra 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 saying 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. Almost every potential investor had turned them away. But Demis had nonetheless scrapped together funding and persuaded gifted researchers to join him, all on the strength of his exhilarating vision. And so his vision of the future is to use AI to solve every single scientific problem that plagues humanity. It is a very optimistic vision. That's why I wanted to include that excerpt at the very beginning of this episode. The optimistic vision of AI Discovery has history in its corner. Past innovations from gunpowder to nuclear fission have made wars more terrifying and accidents more lethal. But the general effect on technological change has been to amplify our experiences and extend our lifespans. And the very act of creating new technologies is intrinsic to being human. And so give some of the examples of the accomplishments that DeepMind had in earlier in their history. 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. There's a great documentary that you can watch on YouTube. It is about Demis and DeepMind and some of their accomplishments. It's called The Thinking Game. So back to this. 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. This was the breakthrough for which Demis shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry. So in 2024, Demis and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for protein structure prediction. Still in the introduction, the author gives an overview of some of the unique characteristics that Demis has. He stands for a type. The missionary entrepreneur and the out of the box scientist who through brilliance and extraordinary drive, emerges as the right person for a particular moment. But at a deeper level, Demis provides a window on life's external enigmas. What drives people to act? What is their purpose? He has been thinking about thinking since he was a little kid, which we'll get into. And so as the author Sebastian spends more and more time with him, he understands the power of stories on the effect of not only how Demis views the world, but also 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 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's 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.