#475 – Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Demis Hassabis, his second time on the podcast. He is the leader of Google Deep Mind and is now a Nobel Prize winner. Demis is one of the most brilliant and fascinating minds in the world today, working on understanding and building intelligence and exploring the big mysteries of our universe. This was truly an honor and a pleasure for me. Now, a quick few second mention of his sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Hampton for connecting with founders and CEOs, Fin for AI customer service, Shopify for building e-commerce businesses, Element for daily electrolytes and AG1 for your health. Choose wisely, my friends. Now on to the full ad reads. I do try to make them interesting, but if you must skip, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. And also to get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Hampton, a private community for high growth founders and CEOs. That's the interesting thing about starting a company and running a company, especially one that's growing really quickly, has to hire a lot, has to scale a lot. It's perhaps a little bit counterintuitive, but for the founder, it can be deeply lonely. I suppose that's one of the reasons they recommend to have a co-founder, but even outside of that, there's just a deep loneliness with putting it all in the line, risking everything, knowing that the chances of success are low. But if you do succeed, the gains are huge. And you have your heart in it, you have your dreams in it, you believe in it, but also there's a constant roller coaster of fear and doubt and hope and moments of triumph and moments of failure, all those go back and forth and just it's a constant psychological turmoil. Anyway, through all that, it's just nice to connect with other people that are going through the same thing, and that's what Hampton is about. It does a thing where every month eight founders face to face have real conversations about their daily struggles. Groups are forming in a bunch of places in New York City, Austin, San Francisco, LA, Miami, Denver, and so on. If you are a founder who's tired of carrying it all alone, visit joinhampton.com/lex to see if it's a fit for you. That's joinhampton.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Finn. It's an AI agent for customer service, so they are laser focused on the customer service application, and they want to do that better than anybody else in the world. In fact, if you measure by the metric of the number of resolutions, so when you have the agent resolve the customer service issue, that's resolution, they have a 59% average resolution rate, which makes it the highest performing customer service agent on the market. It's trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders, and even top AI companies, including Anthropic. The way they design the system is, it can continuously improve from the interaction, so you can continuously analyze, train, test and deploy. Also, probably important to say, they give you a 90 day money back guarantee. Go to fin.ai.lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's fin.ai.lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Even I figured out how to create an online store at lexfridman.com/store. I put up a few shirts. I haven't done anything with it since because I'm not a serious person. There's a lot of serious people that build real businesses on top of Shopify. It's a platform that connects you with millions of people that want to buy stuff and gives you all the tools you need and all the integrations you need to do just that at scale. As we talked about with DHH about the incredible beauty and power of Ruby on Rails that Shopify is powered by. I have not yet built a serious sort of medium scale project on Rails. I need to. It's just I need to actually find things that I need to do web dev type of stuff with to inspire myself to build something useful. I want to build some weird variant of a to-do list, especially now with the help of LLMs, you can generate so much of the code. So I need to figure out how to learn a new framework, a new programming languages when LLMs can generate so much of it. And I don't want to do it exclusively by vibe coding because I feel like that's not a way to learn fully a thing. But vibe coding does remove some of the friction of learning. So balancing that out is a tricky thing to do. Anyway, that's about the programming language and the framework that will power Shopify. But Shopify itself connects buyers and sellers in an incredible scale that's awe-inspiring. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lower case. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I've been traveling recently and I have a lot of Element packets with me and I bring that and I bring bands, whatever you call them. I don't know what they're called. They're like rubber bands for like basic shoulder exercises. So if I have to do a lot of either heavy lifting or heavy jiu-jitsu training, I like to warm up the shoulders really well because probably because I have issues with shoulders from many years of playing tennis and many years of doing stupidly bench press. Anyway, I think of element as a critical component of my workout routine. Hydrate before, rehydrate after. Fully embrace the deliciousness of watermelon salt flavor. The flavor of champions, the one I recommend. It's been quite a while since I tried the others. They're all good. But for me, I'm a man of focus and dedication. And I'm dedicated to watermelon salt. I think they have actually, I saw a lemonade flavor. I think a lot of people love lemonade. So maybe that's your thing. For me, I'm sticking to watermelon salt. Get a free ACOM sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drinklmnt.com/lex.