Demis Hassabis and Sebastian Mallaby on The Quest for Artificial General Intelligence (Part Two)

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**Mia Sorrenti** (1:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. In this episode, we'll return for part two of our recent live event with CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Nobel Laureate, Demis Hassabis, and journalist and author of The Infinity Machine, Sebastian Mallaby.
Hassabis and Mallaby joined us recently at Friends House in London to discuss the rise of artificial intelligence and the pursuit of AGI. They were in conversation with co-anchor of Opening Trade on Bloomberg TV, Tom McKenzie. If you haven't heard part one, we recommend jumping back an episode to catch up. But now let's return to the conversation live at Friends House in London.

**Tom McKenzie** (1:37)
We're living in a moment where we're thinking about AI in warfare, whether it's in Ukraine or in Iran, we're thinking about maybe some of us, Anthropic and Mythos and Cybersecurity. The clear positive is that guiding light that you've had throughout your life, scientific discovery and specifically Alpha Fold 2, Alpha Fold 3, isomorphic labs. Is that where, when we think about the risks, benefits, balance for AI and AGI, is it very clear for you that it's medical advances and biology that some of the clearest wins that we're going to see?

**Demis Hassabis** (2:10)
So I spent my whole life working on AGI because I believe it's the ultimate tool for science and broadly construed. So science and medicine. I think the number one thing we can apply AI to is curing terrible diseases. So number two on my list would be helping with the environment and finding new renewable energy sources.
You can see that's what I care about because that's what I personally done with my time other than building the core technology, right? Things like AlphaFold, isomorphic labs and all of our... We've had a science group, an AI for science group for nearly 10 years now. Some of our rivals are starting to set up science teams to use the AI, but we've had one for 10 years, including... That's where AlphaFold came from. And so we work on fusion, we work on weather prediction, we work on climate models, material science, so there's almost no area of science that I think AI can't help with. And I think if we do that right in the next 10 years, we'll have almost a second Renaissance, a new golden era of scientific discovery.
And ultimately, the reason I started on this journey is I wanted to understand the nature of reality, all the big questions in the world, the nature of consciousness, what is time, all of these things, which are incredible deep mysteries. And it's amazing, I find it amazing that we all just go about our daily lives without thinking too much about this, sort of distracted with what we do. But for me, it just stops me dead in my tracks all the time. And this is what I think about late in the night, in the small hours of the night, is how is it we don't even know what time is? This is crazy. Like we're just going around doing things. You know, it's crazy to me.
And then of course, well, what do we do about that is the question, because I guess I was sort of born with this insatiable curiosity and also almost haunting thing about, like this is a deep mystery here in the universe. It's like an incredible puzzle. That's how I feel about the universe. How are we gonna solve it? And then I guess that's why I got to AI early, is like I tell you what we need. We need some help. Even the best scientists, you know, to read all the biographies of the top scientists, all my favorite heroes from Feynman to Turing. And they're all really smart, but there's a limit to how much we can comprehend, I think, with just unaided with our human minds, even with scientific method and other things. And so it was obvious to me that AI, it was a two-factor thing. Not only would it be an amazing tool for science, but it would be an incredible scientific artifact in and of itself, as an amazing engineering artifact, and possibly help us to understand our own minds better, which is also one of the deep mysteries. So that's why I would have done this no matter what. Like today, it's become the biggest thing it is, but for me, it's the most fascinating question and the most fascinating technology there is out there.