Demis Hassabis says society is “not ready” for the AI future

Jeff Berman (0:01)

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Demis Hassabis (2:11)

A lot of the cyber issues that we've seen in the last six months or so could have been addressed with better engineering, more robust engineering. The human is very much still in the loop, and the next phase which I think carries the most risk is closed RSI, closed loop, without the human reviewer process. And that will obviously be faster, but I think is also a very dangerous way to get to full AGI.

I do think there are some things that generally all the leading labs do agree on, like the idea of third party auditors or evaluators coming in. Obviously, there's a question mark on which third parties, and I think we need a healthy kind of ecosystem of that. You could have good startups and companies doing that. There's enough revenue there for them, given the amount of investment going into AI as a whole.

Jeff Berman (2:58)

This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. In today's episode, our very own Reid Hoffman sits down with the incredible Demis Hassabis. Demis is the co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Reid and Demis discuss the race to AGI, the future of AI fueled scientific discovery, the need for more cooperation on safety efforts and much, much more.

I hope you enjoy it.

Reid Hoffman (3:37)

Demis, thank you for joining us.

Demis Hassabis (3:39)

Great to be here.

Reid Hoffman (3:39)

Thanks for having me. We've known each other for, I think, well over 10 years now, maybe approaching 12 or something like that. It was an honor when you asked me to be on the AI Ethics Board for Google for our various funny meetings.

Demis Hassabis (3:55)

Yes.

Reid Hoffman (3:57)

So, let's start. Because one of the things we've been trying to do at the summit is to be envisioning the world as we'd want to make it. The theme has been agency. And, you know, as you have been a leader in and knew well before most people were thinking about AI, that one of the key things for thinking about AI for human benefit is medicine and medical.

And so, say a little bit about how you envision this, how this helps, you know, people say, oh, if I could be getting that, I understand why you AI guys are actually trying to build something that creates a longer human experience, a more quality of experience, you could call it anti-X risk.

Demis Hassabis (4:38)

Yeah, for sure. I mean, if we take a step back for a moment, it's like big picture. And you know this, knowing us from quite early in our deep mind journey, that the whole point of me working on AI for my whole career was to use it as a kind of like the ultimate tool to advance science and medicine. And our understanding of the world around us, but also improving human health. I've always said that the number one thing we should use these amazing tools that we've now built, and we were, you know, dreaming about 20 years ago, is to improve the human condition and improve human health. And I've tried to do that certainly with my own more personal projects, obviously things like Alpha Fold, but also the spin out drug discovery company Isomorphic. I've tried to push it really hard in that direction, as I know you have too more recently. And I think it's exactly the sorts of things we need to be showing the world that AI can do. I think, you know, what better thing than to, you know, use AI to help us cure terrible diseases.