How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis [video]

Is anyone else reading Sebastian Mallaby’s new book about Demis and Deepmind: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence? It’s pretty good, and goes a lot into his background before Deepmind (chess kid, developing games at bullfrog, CS at Cambridge, bullfrog again, games startup…). He’s certainly an interesting guy, and as others are pointing out, more thoughtful and earnest than your average tech industry leader. One pleasant thing that comes across in the book is how he resisted the allure of moving to Silicon Valley and wanted to keep Deepmind in London, where he still lives.

I hadn’t really appreciated before the connection between his chess and game industry experience and the early reinforcement learning work that put Deepmind on the map, e.g. the Atari game AI demos, AlphaGo, Alphazero, etc. There is a fascinating thread there and it’s certainly a case of the right person with the right mix of past experience and vision being able to pick exactly the right problems to focus on to move technology forward.

The book has a few flaws: it’s maybe a little too uncritical of its subject. But that’s almost a given with books of this kind where the author gets a lot of access.

How would someone with an intellect like Demis Hassabis think?

I want to learn to think more like him. What differences between his way of thinking and mine create such a powerful gap? If I could understand those differences, I might also understand how to narrow that gap. And if we could identify the causes of that gap, perhaps humans in general could develop much further.

I truly envy his intelligence. When I read his writings, I can see fragments of knowledge that he cannot hide, and it makes me think: I want to become like that too.

If you really want to see Demis shine watch The Thinking Game (on Deep Mind YT channel).

People doing frontier research in knowledge representation & reasoning are worrying that soon, with the merging of LLM and knowledge graphs, automated 'everything' from research to production, will be possible. This implies that 'human cleverness' will get you nowhere any more and the only limits will then be computation - a resource Big Tech is hard at work completely walling normal people out of.

There's really a few people leading the AI charge that I think would actually embody the kind of character needed for such a role than Demis. I don't know if he's fooling the public and deeply inside represents a person more aligned with Altman; but I'm really happy he's at the top with the public information I've seen/read about him. I'm hoping Google wins the race and builds a moat so that the other more nefarious leaders get dumpstered.

I want to know about the political infighting between the TPU team, Google Brain team and DeepMind. And the famous tweet of Nando De Freitas on DeepSeek

Honestly, Hassabis and Amodei are the 2 last beacon of hopes for me in the AI race. What they have for them is that they both are scientists and not 'business-bros'. But are they genuine? Will they not be corrupted by power or pressure from shareholders?

The main problem is that in capitalism private companies have only the mission to serve their shareholders/owners.

Public institutions have the mission to serve the public.

The only real solution is to make AI a public good/utility which should be regulated on an international level and overseen by trustworthy institutions.

Bro has made enough money. He should just retire already.