July 3, 2026 • 40 mins
What drives a man to turn down half a million pounds at 18, test Mark Zuckerberg's sincerity over dinner, and wonder aloud if he can win a second Nobel Prize? For Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, the answer is a lifelong pursuit of artificial general intelligence — and an unshakeable belief that the technology he's creating will change everything about what it means to be human. Oz speaks with journalist and author Sebastian Mallaby about his new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, tracing Demis's extraordinary journey from chess prodigy to the man at the center of the most consequential technological race of our time.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's us here. I'm traveling this week and next
week is the fourth of July, so we won't be
publishing a Week in Tech episode for the next two Fridays,
but you'll hear from all of our favorite tech contributors
once again starting July tenth. In the meantime, I wanted
to share an episode that demystified the man behind one
of the most influential AI labs in the world, Google
(00:20):
Deep Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm os Voloscan, and today we
get the opportunity to go behind the curtain at Google's
Deep Mind. For almost three years, in the upstairs room
of a pub in North London, journalist Sebastian Malabi met
regularly with the company's CEO and co founder, Demis Hasabis.
They spoke about artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, motivation and consequence,
(01:03):
all against the backdrop of an increasingly intense three way
race between Open AI Andthropic and Google to win the
race towards Agi so Ba see. Congratulations on your new book,
The Infinity Machine and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Thank you ask great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
You begin the book with a quote from one of
the scientists who work on the Manhattan Project who said,
what we are creating now is a monster whose influence
is going to change history. Yet it would be impossible
not to see it through. The energy source which is
now being made available will make scientists the most hated
and the most wanted citizens of any country.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
We're reliving that now with AI. Agree. I mean, I
began this project wanting to capture the tingling sensation of
human beings like demisis ABIs creating the new version of
atomic weapons. Right, This incredibly powerful AI technology that has
enormous upsides could also be very, very dangerous. The prize
(02:00):
was I didn't have to bring it up to them.
They brought it up to me. I mean, it's so
much on their minds. And so that's why I put
this quotation about the Manhattan Project at the start of
the book, because it's kind of the It sums up
one of the main threads, which is this, you know,
scientists can't resist inventing something which is exciting technically, and
then they're going to be the most hated and most
(02:22):
wanted people in the country.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
You described the question of motivation when it comes to
Demis hanging in the air like the mushroom cloud over
Los Alamos, very arresting visual image. Why that image and
what did you want to stand in the end about
his motivation?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I think when you look at that picture of the
mushroom cloud over Los Alamos, you're kind of thinking both wow,
but also why why did human beings do this? You
know it's so destructive? Why did you do it? And
I guess you know. Part of the thread in my
book is he had a series of ideas about how
(03:03):
he could build AIE and make it safe for humanity
and beneficial for humanity, and one by one these ideas
become unraveled as they collide with reality. So the story
of demisisabass in some ways, you know a story. I
think there's two categories of screw up in the world. Right.
Sometimes you get something where basically idiots are in charge,
(03:24):
they don't understand what they're doing, and they make a
humongous mistake Iran War for example. Right Then you have
another much more interesting category of screw up, and that
is where intelligent people know from the beginning exactly what
they're doing. They can see the risks, they think they
can manage them, but then forces which are larger than them.
In this case with AI, it's a race dynamic between
(03:46):
multiple labs and multiple countries take over and they can
no longer control the technology that they've invented. And I
think those episodes where you couldn't just switch out the
individuals and have a better act come where the individual
is good, sincerely, good, intelligent, thoughtful, has foresight, and yet
(04:07):
you still end up in a bad place. That's what's
really fascinating. When Demis sold his company deep Mind to
Google in twenty fourteen, there was a condition which was
this will never be used for weapons. Well, you know
now it's twenty twenty six it is being used for weapons.
And you know, so in time after time he tried
to draw lines in the sand, and they've all been erased.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
It's harder and harder to say what these AI companies
are today. I mean, for a moment last year, OpenAI
was the most popular social video app company in the world,
and now it doesn't do Sora anymore. But like, what
is your working definition of what deep Mind is.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
I mean, it's a laboratory for the invention of machine intelligence,
and machine intelligence is a very compacious thing. You know,
it goes from text to video to images to a
system like Alpha fold, which divined all the shapes of
proteins in nature, and one demis the Nobel Price. So
it's a huge field, and indeed the creation of it
(05:08):
is a huge thing because you bring in experts in neuroscience,
experts in chemistry, experts in physics, experts, computer science, ethical
experts who can philosophize about the personality that an AI
system should have. I mean, it's a very multidisciplinary thing,
which is part of what makes the story fascinating.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
When did you first meet Demis Now?
Speaker 3 (05:26):
I first met him when I'd being interested in, you know,
technology generally. My last book was about Silicon Valley and
venture capital, and in the process of writing that book,
I would go to tech conferences in Europe and there
would be this sort of diminutive figure with a big,
big smile and sort of a kind of boyish charm,
really unassuming kind of guy with you know, a sort
(05:49):
of round neck sweater and his hair falling forward in
a fringe, and he would get up on the stage
with a big grin and sort of just almost as
if he was talking about how he was about to
wash the dishes after lunch. You know, he would in
a very plain spoken way, talk about well, when I
was a child, I had two ambitions. One was to
understand all of science and the other was to understand
(06:11):
all of philosophy. So I resolved this dilemma by deciding
to build AI, which would help me to understand both.
And so he had this mind blowing mental reach combined
with this totally approachable nextdoor friend kind of attitude.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
And when did you have the idea to pitch him
on being a biographical subject for you?
Speaker 3 (06:32):
So after finishing my last book, The Power Law about
Venture Capital, I was thinking, in you know, this is
now mid twenty twenty two, what would be a good
next subject. And because I had met Demis several times
and I kind of followed what Deep Mind was up to.
I knew about the protein folding system, I knew about
Alpha Go, the go playing system before that, and so forth,
and I had a sense that it would probably go
(06:54):
from the fringe to the mainstream at some point in
the next year or so. And then it took me
if few months after that conversation inside my head to
get my act together and listen to every podcast that
Demis had ever done, read all his lectures, really think
my way into his brain, and then go and see
him to pitch him on giving me a ton of
time because I need a lot of time with people
(07:15):
if I'm going to write a book with him. And
I said, look, you know, I want to write this
book about you. And it seems to me Demists that
you may not want a book about you, but you've
said repeatedly in all of your lectures that AI will
be the most important invention in all of human history. Demists.
So that means if you're the creator of this AI,
(07:37):
you must be one of the most important people in
human history. And if that's the case, you don't have
a choice. Somebody's going to write a book, right And furthermore,
you should welcome this because if you're going to invent
a technology that is going to disrupt people's lives so thoroughly,
you know your job will be different, how you raise
your children will be different, how you think yourself as
(07:58):
a human will be different because you now have this
different source of intelligence competing with you. You can't disrupt
people from head to toe and then not explain them
why you did it. You need to explain your motives, right,
and that's that's the project I'm proposing to you. And
he thought about it, and he seemed well disposed to this,
and then one week later Chatchipt came out.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Oh my goodness, and.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
My expectation of the technology going from the fringe to
the mainstream happened a whole lot quicker than I expected.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
And I mean, obviously a lot of the book of
your interest is in the technology, how it might change
the world, the kind of financing and deal making shenanigans
that made deep mind in many ways what it is today.
But what other personal side of an extraordinary biographical portrait
to very specific parents, a prodigious talent for chess, which
(08:51):
he then gave up because he thought it wasn't in
some sense consequential enough. I mean, did you know when
you got it, you knew that AI was the next thing,
and you know there he was. But did you know
what an extra personal story he had before you really
got into it with him.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
No? I didn't, And in fact, I remember very clearly
too early experiences in the first discussions. You know, one
was I was going to have this dinner I told
you about and he told me to read a book
before I came to the dinner and the book was
Enders a game. Now, this is a science fiction story
about a sort of diminutive boy genius hero who has
(09:27):
to save planet from invading space aliens. And he's at
the end of the book he saves all of humanity
from space aliens. And Demis said to me, well, I
wanted you to read this book because I really identify
with that character Ender. And I'm thinking, wait, so you're
telling me you're the savior of humanity. I mean, even
if you think that Demis, maybe you shouldn't be announcing
(09:47):
it to the person who's about to write a book
about you. I mean, surely that's too messianic, to over
the top, too ridiculous. But he's right out there with it.
You mean, that is how he thinks, and he's not
ashamed to tell you. And so that was pretty extraordinary.
And then and the second thing was I went to
see Shane leg his Scientific co founder, and he told
me the story about how. I said, you know, what
was it light to work with Demis? And he said, well,
(10:10):
you know, Demis has crazy determination. I said, well, what
do you mean He said, well, you know, one day,
according to Demis, his dad said to him during the
chess period of his life. Listen, you're going to go
play chess today. You know you just have to try
your best. Now, when I say that to my son,
I mean, you know, it's fine to lose so long
as you try your best. The way that Demis apparently
(10:31):
interpreted it, according to Shane, was you have to try
your absolute, absolute, absolute best. And it's like running a
race and at the end of the marathon you fall
over the tape and you're on the ground and you
have to be taken to hospital because you're almost dead.
And if you haven't been taken to hospital, it means
you didn't try hard enough. That is what try your
(10:51):
best meant to Demis aged about ten or twelve, And
I went to see Demis the next time and I
replayed this back to him and said, is that really true?
Is that how you interpreted? He said, oh, yeah, absolutely.
You know you have to give it every single drop
all the time.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
And there's an amazing moment where Demis describes talking about
hearing nature or science screaming at him and him struggling
to hear and to understand.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Yeah, that was the most extreme expression of his desire
to invent AI. So one day I was with him
in Hampstead Heath, which is a park in North London.
Not in the pub, Not in the pub. This time
it was a nice day, so we went for this
cafe instead, and you know, there he was. There was
kind of a classic English scene. There was somebody in
front of me who was on his cell phone. You're
(11:37):
doing some sort of sales job, and two women behind
me talking about their friend who had a medical incident
and had to get to a hospital. So all these
quididian noises in the background, and there is demis a
sabists looking at me, talking about the creation of this
godlike machine and saying that when he's up at two
in the morning at his desk at home thinking about this,
he can sort of feel reality summoning him, streaming at him,
(12:00):
understand me, understand me, And you know he would then
slam the table and say, look, Sebastian, this table it's
made of atoms, buzzing around with electrons. Why should it
be solid? Why should that laptop you've got there, why
should it you know, pieces of sand and metal? How
could that turn into something which can think? I mean,
what's going on? Here. There must be some intelligent force
designing all these things. And so he kind of basically
(12:23):
told me that inventing AI and understanding the universe is
like getting closer to what he thinks of as God.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
So he's a religious man.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I don't know if he would agree with religious because
he doesn't go to organized religious services, but he's spiritual.
I would say, interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
And I mean that scene you described could be a
scene from Oppenheimer, right, I mean, it's so cinematic. Did
you ever think is he doing this for me? Or
is he crazy? Or is it just absolutely captivating? The
energy in the sense of purpose that he brings to this.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
He just exudes both energy and intelligence but also storytelling
natural talent. It's just amazing. I mean, you know, one
time I asked him about his first office in London
and Russell Square, which is a sort of storied square,
you know, near the British Museum and so forth. And
you know, normally, as a writer, you are somebody to
recapture the emotion of opening their first office fifteen years ago.
(13:16):
It's fifteen years ago. They're going to say, oh, yeah,
it was cool. You know, That's all you'll get out
of them. But demis just flows with stories. So he said, well,
you know, I was in the attic that's where the
office was, and of course you had to come down
the stairs. They were all Rickety's. So I came down
ding ding ding ding ding, bang bang bang, And then
I come out on the square and there's these beautiful
trees in front of me. Blond to the right. If
you just go three doors down, Sebastian, that's where you
see the London Mathematical Society where Turing invented the origins
(13:41):
of computer science, which we are now completing. And then
if you go beyond that to the level crossing black white,
black white crossing the street, the pedestrian crossing, that is
where the Hungarian nuclear scientist Zilad had the idea for
a nuclear chain reaction back in the nineteen thirties, which
led to the atom bomb. And of course we are
now creating the equivalent of the atom bomb with Ai.
(14:03):
What a subject, Yeah, I mean, he is such a storyteller.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
And I heard that he has a sense of humor
or perhaps a sense of humour about himself in some
ways as well. Didn't he say when he lost the
table football competition? The office that his soul was on fire.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
He did say that, yes, you know, one can mock
him for being too competitive and taking trivial things like
table football seriously, but he actually really feels it.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
We talked about the sort of mushroom cloud of motivation.
One of the things that doesn't seem to be so
motivating to him is money. I mean, there's a story
about the offer as an eighteen year old of a
half million pounds to join game development studio right, which
he turned out right, despite coming from me. I know
his mother had gone through homelessness her in her youth.
(14:47):
I mean, was that a hard decision for him? Why
did he make it?
Speaker 3 (14:50):
He said it was completely easy in today's money. It
was well over a million dollars that he was being offered.
He was eighteen. As you say, his parents were not rich.
I mean, you know, any self respecting sort of Stanford
character would at this point of fall, you know, taking
the money dropped out of Stanford and you know, written
off into the sunset with a loot. No, Demis is different.
Demis wanted to understand science. That was his primary motivation.
(15:13):
That's what he's up when he's up at two o'clock
in the morning. He's thinking, how do I understand nature?
And so he turned down the cash to go and
study computer science instead.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Fast forward a few years and he meets Peter Teel,
who gives him a A plus for science fiction and
an F for business model, but nonetheless a size skiins
some money.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Well, actually there's a fraudulent slip there. You said an
A plus for science fiction. I think you met an
A plus for science.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Science fiction, but science fiction.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Maybe that would have been better, because in fact Demis
was spinning this vision and this is twenty ten, right.
He was saying, I'm going to invent very powerful AI.
This is at a time when AI literally couldn't recognize
the photograph of a cat. Nothing was working, and you
have this character coming and say, oh, I'm going to
create artificial general intelligence. It was nuts. So it kind
(16:06):
of was science fiction.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
What was his entree to the world of technology investors?
And when did deep Mind actually start as a company.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Deep Mind started in twenty ten, having raised the money
from Peter Teel. The entree is very interesting because in
fact what happened was, you know, Demis had done a
small games company before, and he made some money. Wasn't
a terrific success, but nonetheless it wasn't total failure. And
he went back to the same investors. They all said,
you must be joking. There's no product if you're doing
(16:34):
AI and not putting money into that. So then he
had to think again, and his entree into the world
of Peter Teel and what's called the Singularity summits, where
all these very early believers in AI would gather, people
like Ray Kurtzweil, and they would dream about a future
of an AI that totally did not exist. And when
they got up on the stage, actually they did often
(16:56):
draw more on science fiction novels than on science when
they were kind of imagining a future with AI. And
so in this strange cauldron of mythology and reality with
all kinds of weirdos trotting about, demis a Sabots, who
by this point has a computer science degree and a
PhD in neuroscience as a proper scientist, shows up and
(17:18):
he's asked by a journalist what do you think of
the Singularity conference? Are you a Singularitarian? And he says
it's a bit Californian for me, and he's, oh, you
could sort of feel the kind of anxiety of being
seen in this crowd. But that's why you had to
go to meet Peter tele And then when he met
Peter Til, he had this clever trick. Peter Teel is
a chess player. Demis is a chess player. So rather
(17:40):
than pitch Peter tele On some idea about a company,
and he said, well, I think the interesting thing about
chess is that the knight and the Bishop are supremely
well balanced, and it's in that tension between those two
pieces that much of the joy of the game resides.
So p t is like, WHOA, that's a conversation I
want to pursue. And so that got him and got
(18:00):
Demssus Habits an invitation to Peter Teel's house the next day,
and then that's when he pitched him on Deep Mind
and got the money he needed to start the company.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
And then Fast forty twenty thirteen and which the excerpt
in the Wall Street Journal of your book tells the
story of a birthday party for Elon Musk, replete with
all kinds of costumes and strange things and fake battlements.
But this is, perhaps apart from the founding, the most
(18:28):
crucial moment in Deep Minds Genesis as a company.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Right, yeah, that's right. So you know, by this point,
Demis had raised three rounds of venture capital, including from
Elon Musk, and you know, there are various people could
come in, but it was a total pain in the neck.
He hated it. You know, he would sometimes have this expression,
I don't want this part of my brain to expand.
He wanted to be doing science, and so what he
(18:53):
wanted was to be liberated from this hamster wheel of fundraising.
And along at this party, this birthday party that Enol
Musk had, along comes Larry Page from Google who's also there,
and says, let's go for a walk, and they walk
around the castle grounds, and in this bizarre setting, Larry
Page says to him, well, you know, you could spend
(19:15):
your career building another company like Google. That's fine, but
if you really want to do science, just join Google
and we'll give you the resources, use our platform, and
you'll be able to do what you really love. And
Demis not only agreed with that pitch in the sense
that yes, he preferred to do science than to be
a billionaire, but he felt that Larry Page himself would
(19:37):
have accepted that pitch, that Larry Page cared about science.
He could have been a standard professor of computer science.
So Demis really identified with Larry Page, and that was
why he sold to Google.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
And Paige had his eye on Demis or this was impulsive.
Had he planned out his chess game for this party
like Demis had three years before.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
He had totally planned the chess game. He'd been thinking
for a while about buying up nascent AI companies, and
he'd bought the boutique founded by the Toronto professor Jeffrey
Hinton together with Iliasaskeva and one other person. Uh, and
so he was in a buying mode.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
It came into that was twenty twelve, right the image
net team exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
He bought the image net team, and then the next
obvious person to buy was Demis and DeepMind because they
had a different approach to AI. It wasn't just deep learning,
which is the image net secret source, which is kind
of packet pattern recognition learning from data. It was also
what's called reinforcement learning, which is learning through trial and
(20:38):
error in a simulation. So you have a game like
the Atari games or go later on and you try
lots of different the computer trysts and moves ces whies
run works and then learns through trial and error, and
in some ways. Another strand in my book is the
interplay between deep learning on the one hand and reinforcement
learning on the other hand. And these two fields of
(21:01):
artificial intelligence, you know, have their different moments in the sun.
As the story progresses.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Hinton talked, He came on tech Stuff and talked about
how he ran an auction to sell image neet with Google,
Microsoft and by Doo. But in the end, all he
really wanted was to go to Google for for demis.
He was being courted as well by others, including a
dinner at Mark Zuckerberg's house in the I guess weeks
or months after this first meeting with Larry Page at
(21:29):
Elon Maas's birthday party, and he submitted Mark Zuckerberg to
a test at this dinner.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Right, Yeah, that's right. So the test was a bit subtle. Predictably,
they sit down to dinner and Mark Zuckerberg, who's longing
to buy deep Mind to get one over Google.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
And this was not recently, this was ten years ago.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
It was twenty thirteen. So Mark Zuckerberg says, well, I
think AI is the most important technology in human history.
It's extraordinary, and you know, I really hope you agree
to join me at Facebook because you know, we could
just do great things together. Blah blah blah blah. And
then you know, the conversation moves on, time goes by,
(22:10):
and then Demis slyly says, you know, three D printing
is extraordinary, and Zuckerberg goes, yeah, I agree, you know,
incredible that that's just going to unlock so many things.
And then a bit later, Demis says, you know, artificial reality,
that really is going to be transformative, and Zuckerberg's like, yeah,
it's transformative. It's so exciting. I'm so excited by that.
(22:31):
And then Demis's mind is whearing. Is said, Okay, he's
a bullshit artist. He does not believe that AI is
the most important thing ever, he does not get it.
I'm selling to Google, Forget forget.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Facebook, even though the more money on the table.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah, that's right. In fact, Facebook was offering to make
Demis a lot richer, but he was consistent throughout his career.
Demis in turning down the money not to go to
Cambridge University, turning down the money to sell to Facebook.
It's not about the money for him. It's really about
the science.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
And you mentioned him using his scientific method to see
two three years into the future. Instead, Facebook went with
Yan Lacun and gave him plenty of resources, and I
think he was trying to poach some of Dems's employees.
Demist told them that Google deal was going to happen,
to sit and therefore to sit tight, and they did.
But you know, fast forward to twenty twenty six and
(23:16):
Yanklan has sentually been dumped from from Meta and Demis
is where does he sit in Google? Is he is he?
Is he the successor to Sundar? Is he the you know,
the the ego and the ID? I mean, what is
his roll in Google today?
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Well, what his rold is today is to be the
chief executive of Google Deep Mind, which is the AI
engine which is basically powering all the new products in Google.
So he's super important. Sundai is the chief executive of
Albret and Google, and I would argue that the relationship
between Sundar and Demis is the most important relationship in
business anywhere at the moment. Because Sundar has Demiss back,
(23:54):
Sundar gives him the resources, Sundar takes care of the
kind of all that kind of corporate leaderships staff that
Demis is good at, but it's really not what he
wants to do full time. And that gives Demis the
oxygen to pursue AI to the fullest of his abilities,
which are considerable you know, in the future, if Sundar
were to go, I don't think that's happening anytime soon,
(24:15):
by the way, but I think if he were to go,
you know, Demis would obviously be talked about as a candidate.
And it's a really interesting question because he is on
the one hand, somebody who is a leader, has vision,
can motivate people, would have the credibility to lead Google
as an AI company. I mean, how often do you
get somebody who's the CEO and also has a Nobel price.
(24:36):
That would be quite something. But at the same time,
Demis has a side to him that wants to be
a pure scientist that talks to me about you know,
there's too much noise in Silicon Valley. I want to
go and think I want to have a research professorship
at Princeton. That's where Oppenheimer went after the Manhattan Project.
That's where Einstein went, That's where I should be. You know,
he has that kind of you know, retreat to the
(24:59):
idyll of abstract contemplation side to him. And he's so
good at both of these things. It's what makes him exceptional.
I mean, if you mentioned Jan Lukun no, very good scientist,
but clearly not a great operator inside business. You know,
when we could talk about Simultman, a great business operator
but not a scientist, dropped out of Stanford, doesn't have
a degree. You know, it's very rare to find both
(25:21):
in the same person.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
After the break is Demis an evil genius stay with us.
You mentioned earlier in the conversation this kind of journey
(25:56):
Demis had been on where one sort of safety mechanism
after another that he believed in fell away and thus
these kind of metaphors about the atomic bomb. But ironically,
in some sense, the kind of safety to the wayside
(26:17):
race that we're in today with Ai was kicked off
by Demis's desire for a safety board.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Yes, that's a good irony, you're right. So what happened
was that, you know, Demis sold the company to Google
in twenty fourteen, and one of the conditions was there
had to be a safety oversight board whereby Google would
allow Deep Mind to sort of appoint some you know,
important philosophers or other people of independent stature to make
a final decision on when AI would be deployed into
(26:49):
the world. And the idea was this is AI is
too big just to let the corporate board of Google
do whatever it wants with it. You know, there has
to be a check. So the first of these safety
meetings arranged and Demis had the idea, we'll invite Elon
Musk to chair it, and he invited Rieed Hoffmann and
various other people and they all met at SpaceX and
(27:11):
basically what happens. Elon Musk sat there listening, absorbed all
the presentations from deep Mind about their plans to build AI,
and a few months later he announces open Ai, which
is going to be the rival company. And so all
of a sudden, there's Singleton vision, the idea that you know,
only one AI lab would shepherd AI into the world
(27:33):
on behalf of all humanity. That just is by the wayside,
And you've now got two competing labs, and the race
dynamic begins to set in.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
How did Demis feel about what Elon did?
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Betrayed? Elon had sat there listening to all his plans,
and he'd been invited to chair that meeting in good
faith to ensure safety for the world, which, of course
is what at the time Elon was a big duma
and was constantly talking about AI safety and existential risk,
and so the idea that rather than uniting with Deep
(28:07):
Mind and Google in a single effort to make the
technology safe, Elon Musk preferred to go off and start
a rival in open AI to Demis. This was a
total betrayal. Of course, Elon thought of this as Demis
is dangerous, he's an evil genius, and therefore I need
to be the one because you know, all of these
(28:28):
actors they basically say, I know that I'm a good person. Yeah,
if I'm the leader of the AI race, I will
make it safe because I'm good. But those other guys
over there, you can't trust those guys because you know whatever. Now,
if you quizzed Elon Musk about why did he say
that Demis was an Elon was it was an evil genius?
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Your term for a Freudian slip, Elon evil genius?
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Why was demisis and evil genius? Well, the only good reason,
or not a good reason, but a reason was apparently Demis,
in his gay design days, had worked on a game
called Evil Genius, which is a pretty thin basis on
which to call him an evil genius, but whatever I mean,
they all.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Had association Sean Elbows. So then that this is twenty
this is meeting is in twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen, twenty fifteen,
and when is the Alpha Go moment?
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Twenty sixteen? Okay, So coming out of that moment when
Elon Musk decides to set up open Ai, Demis decides, well,
I'm just going to accelerate as fast as possible. And
the first thing he manages to score is this victory
over the Korean Go champion, Lisa Dol And it's a
(29:42):
huge exhibition match in South Korea with all the media
in attendance, and it's kind of an it's not quite
chatchy pt but it's it's a moment when Ai had
what one might call the Kaspar of Deep Blue moment
in nineteen ninety seven, first time the human champion get defeated,
and then twenty sixteen, so that nineteen years later, the
(30:04):
same thing happens with Go.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
And two hundred million people tune in and the defeated
Korean player apologizes to humanity. It's a huge moment, but
it's nothing like the chat Chipet moment six years later.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yeah, because go people watched. Whereas chat ChiPT you used it.
It was personal, it was visceral.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And within a week of you pitching demish on the book,
Chatchipet came out.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
That's right. And I went to see him right after that,
and he said, you know, this is war. Those guys
have parked their tanks in our front yard actually said
on our lawn but translating for American ordience in our
front yard. And so you could see that competitive glint
in his eye, and you knew he was going to
(30:48):
try and fight back.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Was he self aware about the risk of using that
language even for himself given all these Manhattan Project analogies.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
You know, he's a person with many different dimensions, and
he's both capable of worrying about safety and also using
military metaphors to express this determination to crush the opposition.
And I think actually it's going to be a business
school case study of how DeepMind made the comeback because
they merged deep Mind the London Lab with Google Brain,
(31:20):
the Mountain View, Google AI lab. Normally, mergers are super difficult,
they don't work. And here was a merger you had
to do in the middle of an AI race which
had been kicked off by chatchapt You had eight time
zones between California and London. You had a record of
bitter rivalry between the AI scientists from Google and the
ones from deep Mind. And yet they pulled it off.
(31:43):
They did the merger, they blended the cultures, and within
two and a half years they had a model that
was outclassing open AI models.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
See that's his extraordinary I remember when the chetchipt moment happened,
and I would say up until twenty twenty beginning of
twenty twenty five, people were saying Google is down and
out Google might be over. I mean, you knew because
you were reporting along the way that probably wasn't true.
But what the what the indications that you saw that
the rest of the world didn't that convinced you along
(32:11):
the way that that Demis and deep Mind might might
be roaring back into do you put them in the
first place?
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Now, I think it's sort of a pretty close race
between the Gemini model from Demis and then Claude is
doing really well, at the moment, the anthropic model. People
love it for coding and so forth, So you know,
I'm not sure that it's I think the race is
still ongoing. What I would say, though, is that you know,
I'm on record as having written in The New York Times.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
That are around of money.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Right, probably run ound of money. I mean, they may
put it out, but basically, in fact, since I wrote
that piece, they do seem to have focused their business
quite a bit by giving up on Soora for example,
Sura was a classic money losing idea. You know, it
costs enormous amounts to generate video, but people don't pay
you to generate, so quite rightly, they can do it.
(33:02):
So maybe they can cut costs enough to survive. But
they have huge cash need and they do not have
Google's deep pockets behind them, unlike Demos.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
So Demis is kind of winning. But he said to you,
it doesn't necessarily feel like that, right, he said, this
is a paradoxical moment. It should feel amazing, but it
doesn't feel how I thought it would feel.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah, because early on he had this rather naive idea
that there would be one lab building AI and so
you could take your time about releasing the models, and
you know, if you were worried about safety, you could
just take another six months to test them. And now
you have this race, and you know, the Chinese have
plenty of models, and the other thing, it's not just
a race, it's actually also the open source nature of
(33:43):
these models, where they're being released out into the wild,
and some weird group can just download the model, have
it on their own computer, and then you can't pull
it back anymore. And so there was a big cyber
attack in Mexico recently where all of the actual records
were stolen, and Anthropic realized that its clawed model was
(34:04):
being used. But because that model is proprietary, they could
immediately shut off access and stop the attack. You couldn't
do that with an open weight, open source model. And
yet we have open weight, you know, that's being put
out there, both by Meta and by the Chinese and
by Mestride in France. A lot of open source models
are out there, and so in many ways the way
(34:27):
AI is being deployed is frightening. The obvious safety measures
one might take are not happening. In addition to banning
open source, I think there should be much more powerful
sort of government oversight, so that, just like with a pharmaceutical,
before you release it to be used in people, has
to go through clinical trials. So too, I think there
(34:47):
should be a sort of equivalent of the Food and
Drug Administration, an AI agency that can actually veto the
release of really powerful models. And we don't have that,
and we should have that, and we should be negotiating
with Chin about doing it in both places at once,
because this is a global race and both sides have
to slow down. I was in China recently for eight
days because they always published books faster, so I was
(35:12):
meeting AI leaders, both from industry and from academia, and
I was surprised by how much they do talk about safety.
So I think there is a discussion to be had
with the Chinese about safety, but the US administration of
this moment doesn't want to do that.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
I mean, coming back to the Manhattan Project again, Demis
has said I think that he thinks this may end
in a bunker And what does he mean by that?
And has he primed himself psychologically for an ai Hiroshima
that he may feel in some sense responsible for.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Yeah, I mean, when I was doing the research interfering,
not just Demis, but all the scientists that he works with,
you know, one hundred or something of them. In Deep Mind.
I would hear these references to the bunker come up,
and I assumed it wasn't literally, you know, a real thing.
That Demis wanted to disappear into a bunker at the
moment when he thought the AI models were coming dangerously powerful.
(36:08):
And I would have these dinners every six months with
a friend who had been at Deep Mind but had left,
and I tested this on him one evening and I said, yeah,
surely this is just a metaphor bunker. He can't be serious.
And this guy said, well, actually, you know, I had
my bag packed. It was serious. There was actually this
(36:28):
vision that AI would become so powerful that bad guys
would try and get it off you. So you had
to hide in some place a bit like Los Animals
and develop in seat of isolation and secret, and also
be isolated because you needed maximum focus on the science
to get it right when you were at this moment
of maximum danger because the model was suddenly very powerful.
(36:51):
And that was his vision. Now I think today he
doesn't believe that anymore, because we're so far from a
single lab, you know, midwifing AI. So I think now
he's more inclined to speak of some version of the
Center for European Nuclear Research SERAN, which is a sort
of technical agency that oversees nuclear power on a multinational basis.
(37:15):
I think he would like some sort of global body
to impose rules on what kind of AI should be
let out into the wild. But you know, at the
same time, he knows that politically that's not on the cards,
and he has a sense of timing about when you
should raise these issues, and so you know, whereas Dariama
(37:36):
Day took on the Pentagon by trying to assert safety
principles and then just got rolled, I think their miss
when he does that, is going to feel that he's
got the door is half open, and he can give
it a push and we'll see. You know, of course,
sometimes people keep their capital drive for so long that
they never use it. But we'll see if the moment
(37:57):
comes when he does use it, it'll be very interesting. Bess.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Just close. There was a great review of your book
in the Financial Times which ends with this, Whether and
how Demis ever achieves AGI will form the defining chapters
of his extraordinary and unfinished biography. What did you think
about that? And what is the next chapter for him?
And will you write another follow up book?
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Do you think? You know?
Speaker 3 (38:20):
I tend not to write follow ups about the same thing,
the same person. I prefer to plower of fresh ground.
But look, I mean, you know, Demis is turming fifty
this year. He's got a lot of runway. I'm sure
he'll do more incredible things in the future. So probably
I am offering an interim report. But the advantage you know,
if you wait, I did this before with Alan Greenspann.
(38:40):
I wrote the definitive biography after he retired, and by
that time, you know, people are interested, but less so
than when he's stood in the seat. I think capturing
a portrait of you know, the most interesting figure in
artificial intelligence in real time while he's still in the
seat and he's still doing it is sometimes the fun
of it, right, I mean, who wants to for the
definitive biography in twenty years time? But well, next for him,
(39:03):
you know, I think he's going to carry on running
Google Deep Mind. There's going to be more agentic models
coming out this year. There will be you know, world
models and more robotics coming, there will probably be much
more AI for science, both in terms of drug discovery
and in terms of you know, material sciences, chemistry and
so forth. So I think, you know, one day, I remember,
(39:26):
towards the end of my time interviewing him, he showed
up at the pub and he had a backpack and
he'd pished something out of it, and he got this
little box out and he said, I got to show
you this, and he opened the box up and inside
was the Nobel Prize medal, And either at that meeting
or another one, he said to me, I wonder if
(39:47):
I can get another one. He's not over yet.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
It's a fasting amount of me.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Thank you. It's been great fun to talk for tech Stuff.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
I'm oz Voloscian.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me Julia Nutter and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. The
engineer is Paul Bowman and Jack Insley makes this episode.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Gmail dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
We also love to hear what you think our panels
should cover next time
Hey, it's us here. I'm traveling this week and next
week is the fourth of July, so we won't be
publishing a Week in Tech episode for the next two Fridays,
but you'll hear from all of our favorite tech contributors
once again starting July tenth. In the meantime, I wanted
to share an episode that demystified the man behind one
of the most influential AI labs in the world, Google
(00:20):
Deep Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm os Voloscan, and today we
get the opportunity to go behind the curtain at Google's
Deep Mind. For almost three years, in the upstairs room
of a pub in North London, journalist Sebastian Malabi met
regularly with the company's CEO and co founder, Demis Hasabis.
They spoke about artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, motivation and consequence,
(01:03):
all against the backdrop of an increasingly intense three way
race between Open AI Andthropic and Google to win the
race towards Agi so Ba see. Congratulations on your new book,
The Infinity Machine and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Thank you ask great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
You begin the book with a quote from one of
the scientists who work on the Manhattan Project who said,
what we are creating now is a monster whose influence
is going to change history. Yet it would be impossible
not to see it through. The energy source which is
now being made available will make scientists the most hated
and the most wanted citizens of any country.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
We're reliving that now with AI. Agree. I mean, I
began this project wanting to capture the tingling sensation of
human beings like demisis ABIs creating the new version of
atomic weapons. Right, This incredibly powerful AI technology that has
enormous upsides could also be very, very dangerous. The prize
(02:00):
was I didn't have to bring it up to them.
They brought it up to me. I mean, it's so
much on their minds. And so that's why I put
this quotation about the Manhattan Project at the start of
the book, because it's kind of the It sums up
one of the main threads, which is this, you know,
scientists can't resist inventing something which is exciting technically, and
then they're going to be the most hated and most
(02:22):
wanted people in the country.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
You described the question of motivation when it comes to
Demis hanging in the air like the mushroom cloud over
Los Alamos, very arresting visual image. Why that image and
what did you want to stand in the end about
his motivation?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I think when you look at that picture of the
mushroom cloud over Los Alamos, you're kind of thinking both wow,
but also why why did human beings do this? You
know it's so destructive? Why did you do it? And
I guess you know. Part of the thread in my
book is he had a series of ideas about how
(03:03):
he could build AIE and make it safe for humanity
and beneficial for humanity, and one by one these ideas
become unraveled as they collide with reality. So the story
of demisisabass in some ways, you know a story. I
think there's two categories of screw up in the world. Right.
Sometimes you get something where basically idiots are in charge,
(03:24):
they don't understand what they're doing, and they make a
humongous mistake Iran War for example. Right Then you have
another much more interesting category of screw up, and that
is where intelligent people know from the beginning exactly what
they're doing. They can see the risks, they think they
can manage them, but then forces which are larger than them.
In this case with AI, it's a race dynamic between
(03:46):
multiple labs and multiple countries take over and they can
no longer control the technology that they've invented. And I
think those episodes where you couldn't just switch out the
individuals and have a better act come where the individual
is good, sincerely, good, intelligent, thoughtful, has foresight, and yet
(04:07):
you still end up in a bad place. That's what's
really fascinating. When Demis sold his company deep Mind to
Google in twenty fourteen, there was a condition which was
this will never be used for weapons. Well, you know
now it's twenty twenty six it is being used for weapons.
And you know, so in time after time he tried
to draw lines in the sand, and they've all been erased.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
It's harder and harder to say what these AI companies
are today. I mean, for a moment last year, OpenAI
was the most popular social video app company in the world,
and now it doesn't do Sora anymore. But like, what
is your working definition of what deep Mind is.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
I mean, it's a laboratory for the invention of machine intelligence,
and machine intelligence is a very compacious thing. You know,
it goes from text to video to images to a
system like Alpha fold, which divined all the shapes of
proteins in nature, and one demis the Nobel Price. So
it's a huge field, and indeed the creation of it
(05:08):
is a huge thing because you bring in experts in neuroscience,
experts in chemistry, experts in physics, experts, computer science, ethical
experts who can philosophize about the personality that an AI
system should have. I mean, it's a very multidisciplinary thing,
which is part of what makes the story fascinating.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
When did you first meet Demis Now?
Speaker 3 (05:26):
I first met him when I'd being interested in, you know,
technology generally. My last book was about Silicon Valley and
venture capital, and in the process of writing that book,
I would go to tech conferences in Europe and there
would be this sort of diminutive figure with a big,
big smile and sort of a kind of boyish charm,
really unassuming kind of guy with you know, a sort
(05:49):
of round neck sweater and his hair falling forward in
a fringe, and he would get up on the stage
with a big grin and sort of just almost as
if he was talking about how he was about to
wash the dishes after lunch. You know, he would in
a very plain spoken way, talk about well, when I
was a child, I had two ambitions. One was to
understand all of science and the other was to understand
(06:11):
all of philosophy. So I resolved this dilemma by deciding
to build AI, which would help me to understand both.
And so he had this mind blowing mental reach combined
with this totally approachable nextdoor friend kind of attitude.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
And when did you have the idea to pitch him
on being a biographical subject for you?
Speaker 3 (06:32):
So after finishing my last book, The Power Law about
Venture Capital, I was thinking, in you know, this is
now mid twenty twenty two, what would be a good
next subject. And because I had met Demis several times
and I kind of followed what Deep Mind was up to.
I knew about the protein folding system, I knew about
Alpha Go, the go playing system before that, and so forth,
and I had a sense that it would probably go
(06:54):
from the fringe to the mainstream at some point in
the next year or so. And then it took me
if few months after that conversation inside my head to
get my act together and listen to every podcast that
Demis had ever done, read all his lectures, really think
my way into his brain, and then go and see
him to pitch him on giving me a ton of
time because I need a lot of time with people
(07:15):
if I'm going to write a book with him. And
I said, look, you know, I want to write this
book about you. And it seems to me Demists that
you may not want a book about you, but you've
said repeatedly in all of your lectures that AI will
be the most important invention in all of human history. Demists.
So that means if you're the creator of this AI,
(07:37):
you must be one of the most important people in
human history. And if that's the case, you don't have
a choice. Somebody's going to write a book, right And furthermore,
you should welcome this because if you're going to invent
a technology that is going to disrupt people's lives so thoroughly,
you know your job will be different, how you raise
your children will be different, how you think yourself as
(07:58):
a human will be different because you now have this
different source of intelligence competing with you. You can't disrupt
people from head to toe and then not explain them
why you did it. You need to explain your motives, right,
and that's that's the project I'm proposing to you. And
he thought about it, and he seemed well disposed to this,
and then one week later Chatchipt came out.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Oh my goodness, and.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
My expectation of the technology going from the fringe to
the mainstream happened a whole lot quicker than I expected.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
And I mean, obviously a lot of the book of
your interest is in the technology, how it might change
the world, the kind of financing and deal making shenanigans
that made deep mind in many ways what it is today.
But what other personal side of an extraordinary biographical portrait
to very specific parents, a prodigious talent for chess, which
(08:51):
he then gave up because he thought it wasn't in
some sense consequential enough. I mean, did you know when
you got it, you knew that AI was the next thing,
and you know there he was. But did you know
what an extra personal story he had before you really
got into it with him.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
No? I didn't, And in fact, I remember very clearly
too early experiences in the first discussions. You know, one
was I was going to have this dinner I told
you about and he told me to read a book
before I came to the dinner and the book was
Enders a game. Now, this is a science fiction story
about a sort of diminutive boy genius hero who has
(09:27):
to save planet from invading space aliens. And he's at
the end of the book he saves all of humanity
from space aliens. And Demis said to me, well, I
wanted you to read this book because I really identify
with that character Ender. And I'm thinking, wait, so you're
telling me you're the savior of humanity. I mean, even
if you think that Demis, maybe you shouldn't be announcing
(09:47):
it to the person who's about to write a book
about you. I mean, surely that's too messianic, to over
the top, too ridiculous. But he's right out there with it.
You mean, that is how he thinks, and he's not
ashamed to tell you. And so that was pretty extraordinary.
And then and the second thing was I went to
see Shane leg his Scientific co founder, and he told
me the story about how. I said, you know, what
was it light to work with Demis? And he said, well,
(10:10):
you know, Demis has crazy determination. I said, well, what
do you mean He said, well, you know, one day,
according to Demis, his dad said to him during the
chess period of his life. Listen, you're going to go
play chess today. You know you just have to try
your best. Now, when I say that to my son,
I mean, you know, it's fine to lose so long
as you try your best. The way that Demis apparently
(10:31):
interpreted it, according to Shane, was you have to try
your absolute, absolute, absolute best. And it's like running a
race and at the end of the marathon you fall
over the tape and you're on the ground and you
have to be taken to hospital because you're almost dead.
And if you haven't been taken to hospital, it means
you didn't try hard enough. That is what try your
(10:51):
best meant to Demis aged about ten or twelve, And
I went to see Demis the next time and I
replayed this back to him and said, is that really true?
Is that how you interpreted? He said, oh, yeah, absolutely.
You know you have to give it every single drop
all the time.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
And there's an amazing moment where Demis describes talking about
hearing nature or science screaming at him and him struggling
to hear and to understand.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Yeah, that was the most extreme expression of his desire
to invent AI. So one day I was with him
in Hampstead Heath, which is a park in North London.
Not in the pub, Not in the pub. This time
it was a nice day, so we went for this
cafe instead, and you know, there he was. There was
kind of a classic English scene. There was somebody in
front of me who was on his cell phone. You're
(11:37):
doing some sort of sales job, and two women behind
me talking about their friend who had a medical incident
and had to get to a hospital. So all these
quididian noises in the background, and there is demis a
sabists looking at me, talking about the creation of this
godlike machine and saying that when he's up at two
in the morning at his desk at home thinking about this,
he can sort of feel reality summoning him, streaming at him,
(12:00):
understand me, understand me, And you know he would then
slam the table and say, look, Sebastian, this table it's
made of atoms, buzzing around with electrons. Why should it
be solid? Why should that laptop you've got there, why
should it you know, pieces of sand and metal? How
could that turn into something which can think? I mean,
what's going on? Here. There must be some intelligent force
designing all these things. And so he kind of basically
(12:23):
told me that inventing AI and understanding the universe is
like getting closer to what he thinks of as God.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
So he's a religious man.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I don't know if he would agree with religious because
he doesn't go to organized religious services, but he's spiritual.
I would say, interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
And I mean that scene you described could be a
scene from Oppenheimer, right, I mean, it's so cinematic. Did
you ever think is he doing this for me? Or
is he crazy? Or is it just absolutely captivating? The
energy in the sense of purpose that he brings to this.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
He just exudes both energy and intelligence but also storytelling
natural talent. It's just amazing. I mean, you know, one
time I asked him about his first office in London
and Russell Square, which is a sort of storied square,
you know, near the British Museum and so forth. And
you know, normally, as a writer, you are somebody to
recapture the emotion of opening their first office fifteen years ago.
(13:16):
It's fifteen years ago. They're going to say, oh, yeah,
it was cool. You know, That's all you'll get out
of them. But demis just flows with stories. So he said, well,
you know, I was in the attic that's where the
office was, and of course you had to come down
the stairs. They were all Rickety's. So I came down
ding ding ding ding ding, bang bang bang, And then
I come out on the square and there's these beautiful
trees in front of me. Blond to the right. If
you just go three doors down, Sebastian, that's where you
see the London Mathematical Society where Turing invented the origins
(13:41):
of computer science, which we are now completing. And then
if you go beyond that to the level crossing black white,
black white crossing the street, the pedestrian crossing, that is
where the Hungarian nuclear scientist Zilad had the idea for
a nuclear chain reaction back in the nineteen thirties, which
led to the atom bomb. And of course we are
now creating the equivalent of the atom bomb with Ai.
(14:03):
What a subject, Yeah, I mean, he is such a storyteller.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
And I heard that he has a sense of humor
or perhaps a sense of humour about himself in some
ways as well. Didn't he say when he lost the
table football competition? The office that his soul was on fire.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
He did say that, yes, you know, one can mock
him for being too competitive and taking trivial things like
table football seriously, but he actually really feels it.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
We talked about the sort of mushroom cloud of motivation.
One of the things that doesn't seem to be so
motivating to him is money. I mean, there's a story
about the offer as an eighteen year old of a
half million pounds to join game development studio right, which
he turned out right, despite coming from me. I know
his mother had gone through homelessness her in her youth.
(14:47):
I mean, was that a hard decision for him? Why
did he make it?
Speaker 3 (14:50):
He said it was completely easy in today's money. It
was well over a million dollars that he was being offered.
He was eighteen. As you say, his parents were not rich.
I mean, you know, any self respecting sort of Stanford
character would at this point of fall, you know, taking
the money dropped out of Stanford and you know, written
off into the sunset with a loot. No, Demis is different.
Demis wanted to understand science. That was his primary motivation.
(15:13):
That's what he's up when he's up at two o'clock
in the morning. He's thinking, how do I understand nature?
And so he turned down the cash to go and
study computer science instead.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Fast forward a few years and he meets Peter Teel,
who gives him a A plus for science fiction and
an F for business model, but nonetheless a size skiins
some money.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Well, actually there's a fraudulent slip there. You said an
A plus for science fiction. I think you met an
A plus for science.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Science fiction, but science fiction.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Maybe that would have been better, because in fact Demis
was spinning this vision and this is twenty ten, right.
He was saying, I'm going to invent very powerful AI.
This is at a time when AI literally couldn't recognize
the photograph of a cat. Nothing was working, and you
have this character coming and say, oh, I'm going to
create artificial general intelligence. It was nuts. So it kind
(16:06):
of was science fiction.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
What was his entree to the world of technology investors?
And when did deep Mind actually start as a company.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Deep Mind started in twenty ten, having raised the money
from Peter Teel. The entree is very interesting because in
fact what happened was, you know, Demis had done a
small games company before, and he made some money. Wasn't
a terrific success, but nonetheless it wasn't total failure. And
he went back to the same investors. They all said,
you must be joking. There's no product if you're doing
(16:34):
AI and not putting money into that. So then he
had to think again, and his entree into the world
of Peter Teel and what's called the Singularity summits, where
all these very early believers in AI would gather, people
like Ray Kurtzweil, and they would dream about a future
of an AI that totally did not exist. And when
they got up on the stage, actually they did often
(16:56):
draw more on science fiction novels than on science when
they were kind of imagining a future with AI. And
so in this strange cauldron of mythology and reality with
all kinds of weirdos trotting about, demis a Sabots, who
by this point has a computer science degree and a
PhD in neuroscience as a proper scientist, shows up and
(17:18):
he's asked by a journalist what do you think of
the Singularity conference? Are you a Singularitarian? And he says
it's a bit Californian for me, and he's, oh, you
could sort of feel the kind of anxiety of being
seen in this crowd. But that's why you had to
go to meet Peter tele And then when he met
Peter Til, he had this clever trick. Peter Teel is
a chess player. Demis is a chess player. So rather
(17:40):
than pitch Peter tele On some idea about a company,
and he said, well, I think the interesting thing about
chess is that the knight and the Bishop are supremely
well balanced, and it's in that tension between those two
pieces that much of the joy of the game resides.
So p t is like, WHOA, that's a conversation I
want to pursue. And so that got him and got
(18:00):
Demssus Habits an invitation to Peter Teel's house the next day,
and then that's when he pitched him on Deep Mind
and got the money he needed to start the company.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
And then Fast forty twenty thirteen and which the excerpt
in the Wall Street Journal of your book tells the
story of a birthday party for Elon Musk, replete with
all kinds of costumes and strange things and fake battlements.
But this is, perhaps apart from the founding, the most
(18:28):
crucial moment in Deep Minds Genesis as a company.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Right, yeah, that's right. So you know, by this point,
Demis had raised three rounds of venture capital, including from
Elon Musk, and you know, there are various people could
come in, but it was a total pain in the neck.
He hated it. You know, he would sometimes have this expression,
I don't want this part of my brain to expand.
He wanted to be doing science, and so what he
(18:53):
wanted was to be liberated from this hamster wheel of fundraising.
And along at this party, this birthday party that Enol
Musk had, along comes Larry Page from Google who's also there,
and says, let's go for a walk, and they walk
around the castle grounds, and in this bizarre setting, Larry
Page says to him, well, you know, you could spend
(19:15):
your career building another company like Google. That's fine, but
if you really want to do science, just join Google
and we'll give you the resources, use our platform, and
you'll be able to do what you really love. And
Demis not only agreed with that pitch in the sense
that yes, he preferred to do science than to be
a billionaire, but he felt that Larry Page himself would
(19:37):
have accepted that pitch, that Larry Page cared about science.
He could have been a standard professor of computer science.
So Demis really identified with Larry Page, and that was
why he sold to Google.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
And Paige had his eye on Demis or this was impulsive.
Had he planned out his chess game for this party
like Demis had three years before.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
He had totally planned the chess game. He'd been thinking
for a while about buying up nascent AI companies, and
he'd bought the boutique founded by the Toronto professor Jeffrey
Hinton together with Iliasaskeva and one other person. Uh, and
so he was in a buying mode.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
It came into that was twenty twelve, right the image
net team exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
He bought the image net team, and then the next
obvious person to buy was Demis and DeepMind because they
had a different approach to AI. It wasn't just deep learning,
which is the image net secret source, which is kind
of packet pattern recognition learning from data. It was also
what's called reinforcement learning, which is learning through trial and
(20:38):
error in a simulation. So you have a game like
the Atari games or go later on and you try
lots of different the computer trysts and moves ces whies
run works and then learns through trial and error, and
in some ways. Another strand in my book is the
interplay between deep learning on the one hand and reinforcement
learning on the other hand. And these two fields of
(21:01):
artificial intelligence, you know, have their different moments in the sun.
As the story progresses.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Hinton talked, He came on tech Stuff and talked about
how he ran an auction to sell image neet with Google,
Microsoft and by Doo. But in the end, all he
really wanted was to go to Google for for demis.
He was being courted as well by others, including a
dinner at Mark Zuckerberg's house in the I guess weeks
or months after this first meeting with Larry Page at
(21:29):
Elon Maas's birthday party, and he submitted Mark Zuckerberg to
a test at this dinner.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Right, Yeah, that's right. So the test was a bit subtle. Predictably,
they sit down to dinner and Mark Zuckerberg, who's longing
to buy deep Mind to get one over Google.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
And this was not recently, this was ten years ago.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
It was twenty thirteen. So Mark Zuckerberg says, well, I
think AI is the most important technology in human history.
It's extraordinary, and you know, I really hope you agree
to join me at Facebook because you know, we could
just do great things together. Blah blah blah blah. And
then you know, the conversation moves on, time goes by,
(22:10):
and then Demis slyly says, you know, three D printing
is extraordinary, and Zuckerberg goes, yeah, I agree, you know,
incredible that that's just going to unlock so many things.
And then a bit later, Demis says, you know, artificial reality,
that really is going to be transformative, and Zuckerberg's like, yeah,
it's transformative. It's so exciting. I'm so excited by that.
(22:31):
And then Demis's mind is whearing. Is said, Okay, he's
a bullshit artist. He does not believe that AI is
the most important thing ever, he does not get it.
I'm selling to Google, Forget forget.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Facebook, even though the more money on the table.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah, that's right. In fact, Facebook was offering to make
Demis a lot richer, but he was consistent throughout his career.
Demis in turning down the money not to go to
Cambridge University, turning down the money to sell to Facebook.
It's not about the money for him. It's really about
the science.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
And you mentioned him using his scientific method to see
two three years into the future. Instead, Facebook went with
Yan Lacun and gave him plenty of resources, and I
think he was trying to poach some of Dems's employees.
Demist told them that Google deal was going to happen,
to sit and therefore to sit tight, and they did.
But you know, fast forward to twenty twenty six and
(23:16):
Yanklan has sentually been dumped from from Meta and Demis
is where does he sit in Google? Is he is he?
Is he the successor to Sundar? Is he the you know,
the the ego and the ID? I mean, what is
his roll in Google today?
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Well, what his rold is today is to be the
chief executive of Google Deep Mind, which is the AI
engine which is basically powering all the new products in Google.
So he's super important. Sundai is the chief executive of
Albret and Google, and I would argue that the relationship
between Sundar and Demis is the most important relationship in
business anywhere at the moment. Because Sundar has Demiss back,
(23:54):
Sundar gives him the resources, Sundar takes care of the
kind of all that kind of corporate leaderships staff that
Demis is good at, but it's really not what he
wants to do full time. And that gives Demis the
oxygen to pursue AI to the fullest of his abilities,
which are considerable you know, in the future, if Sundar
were to go, I don't think that's happening anytime soon,
(24:15):
by the way, but I think if he were to go,
you know, Demis would obviously be talked about as a candidate.
And it's a really interesting question because he is on
the one hand, somebody who is a leader, has vision,
can motivate people, would have the credibility to lead Google
as an AI company. I mean, how often do you
get somebody who's the CEO and also has a Nobel price.
(24:36):
That would be quite something. But at the same time,
Demis has a side to him that wants to be
a pure scientist that talks to me about you know,
there's too much noise in Silicon Valley. I want to
go and think I want to have a research professorship
at Princeton. That's where Oppenheimer went after the Manhattan Project.
That's where Einstein went, That's where I should be. You know,
he has that kind of you know, retreat to the
(24:59):
idyll of abstract contemplation side to him. And he's so
good at both of these things. It's what makes him exceptional.
I mean, if you mentioned Jan Lukun no, very good scientist,
but clearly not a great operator inside business. You know,
when we could talk about Simultman, a great business operator
but not a scientist, dropped out of Stanford, doesn't have
a degree. You know, it's very rare to find both
(25:21):
in the same person.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
After the break is Demis an evil genius stay with us.
You mentioned earlier in the conversation this kind of journey
(25:56):
Demis had been on where one sort of safety mechanism
after another that he believed in fell away and thus
these kind of metaphors about the atomic bomb. But ironically,
in some sense, the kind of safety to the wayside
(26:17):
race that we're in today with Ai was kicked off
by Demis's desire for a safety board.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Yes, that's a good irony, you're right. So what happened
was that, you know, Demis sold the company to Google
in twenty fourteen, and one of the conditions was there
had to be a safety oversight board whereby Google would
allow Deep Mind to sort of appoint some you know,
important philosophers or other people of independent stature to make
a final decision on when AI would be deployed into
(26:49):
the world. And the idea was this is AI is
too big just to let the corporate board of Google
do whatever it wants with it. You know, there has
to be a check. So the first of these safety
meetings arranged and Demis had the idea, we'll invite Elon
Musk to chair it, and he invited Rieed Hoffmann and
various other people and they all met at SpaceX and
(27:11):
basically what happens. Elon Musk sat there listening, absorbed all
the presentations from deep Mind about their plans to build AI,
and a few months later he announces open Ai, which
is going to be the rival company. And so all
of a sudden, there's Singleton vision, the idea that you know,
only one AI lab would shepherd AI into the world
(27:33):
on behalf of all humanity. That just is by the wayside,
And you've now got two competing labs, and the race
dynamic begins to set in.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
How did Demis feel about what Elon did?
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Betrayed? Elon had sat there listening to all his plans,
and he'd been invited to chair that meeting in good
faith to ensure safety for the world, which, of course
is what at the time Elon was a big duma
and was constantly talking about AI safety and existential risk,
and so the idea that rather than uniting with Deep
(28:07):
Mind and Google in a single effort to make the
technology safe, Elon Musk preferred to go off and start
a rival in open AI to Demis. This was a
total betrayal. Of course, Elon thought of this as Demis
is dangerous, he's an evil genius, and therefore I need
to be the one because you know, all of these
(28:28):
actors they basically say, I know that I'm a good person. Yeah,
if I'm the leader of the AI race, I will
make it safe because I'm good. But those other guys
over there, you can't trust those guys because you know whatever. Now,
if you quizzed Elon Musk about why did he say
that Demis was an Elon was it was an evil genius?
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Your term for a Freudian slip, Elon evil genius?
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Why was demisis and evil genius? Well, the only good reason,
or not a good reason, but a reason was apparently Demis,
in his gay design days, had worked on a game
called Evil Genius, which is a pretty thin basis on
which to call him an evil genius, but whatever I mean,
they all.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Had association Sean Elbows. So then that this is twenty
this is meeting is in twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen, twenty fifteen,
and when is the Alpha Go moment?
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Twenty sixteen? Okay, So coming out of that moment when
Elon Musk decides to set up open Ai, Demis decides, well,
I'm just going to accelerate as fast as possible. And
the first thing he manages to score is this victory
over the Korean Go champion, Lisa Dol And it's a
(29:42):
huge exhibition match in South Korea with all the media
in attendance, and it's kind of an it's not quite
chatchy pt but it's it's a moment when Ai had
what one might call the Kaspar of Deep Blue moment
in nineteen ninety seven, first time the human champion get defeated,
and then twenty sixteen, so that nineteen years later, the
(30:04):
same thing happens with Go.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
And two hundred million people tune in and the defeated
Korean player apologizes to humanity. It's a huge moment, but
it's nothing like the chat Chipet moment six years later.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yeah, because go people watched. Whereas chat ChiPT you used it.
It was personal, it was visceral.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And within a week of you pitching demish on the book,
Chatchipet came out.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
That's right. And I went to see him right after that,
and he said, you know, this is war. Those guys
have parked their tanks in our front yard actually said
on our lawn but translating for American ordience in our
front yard. And so you could see that competitive glint
in his eye, and you knew he was going to
(30:48):
try and fight back.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Was he self aware about the risk of using that
language even for himself given all these Manhattan Project analogies.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
You know, he's a person with many different dimensions, and
he's both capable of worrying about safety and also using
military metaphors to express this determination to crush the opposition.
And I think actually it's going to be a business
school case study of how DeepMind made the comeback because
they merged deep Mind the London Lab with Google Brain,
(31:20):
the Mountain View, Google AI lab. Normally, mergers are super difficult,
they don't work. And here was a merger you had
to do in the middle of an AI race which
had been kicked off by chatchapt You had eight time
zones between California and London. You had a record of
bitter rivalry between the AI scientists from Google and the
ones from deep Mind. And yet they pulled it off.
(31:43):
They did the merger, they blended the cultures, and within
two and a half years they had a model that
was outclassing open AI models.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
See that's his extraordinary I remember when the chetchipt moment happened,
and I would say up until twenty twenty beginning of
twenty twenty five, people were saying Google is down and
out Google might be over. I mean, you knew because
you were reporting along the way that probably wasn't true.
But what the what the indications that you saw that
the rest of the world didn't that convinced you along
(32:11):
the way that that Demis and deep Mind might might
be roaring back into do you put them in the
first place?
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Now, I think it's sort of a pretty close race
between the Gemini model from Demis and then Claude is
doing really well, at the moment, the anthropic model. People
love it for coding and so forth, So you know,
I'm not sure that it's I think the race is
still ongoing. What I would say, though, is that you know,
I'm on record as having written in The New York Times.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
That are around of money.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Right, probably run ound of money. I mean, they may
put it out, but basically, in fact, since I wrote
that piece, they do seem to have focused their business
quite a bit by giving up on Soora for example,
Sura was a classic money losing idea. You know, it
costs enormous amounts to generate video, but people don't pay
you to generate, so quite rightly, they can do it.
(33:02):
So maybe they can cut costs enough to survive. But
they have huge cash need and they do not have
Google's deep pockets behind them, unlike Demos.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
So Demis is kind of winning. But he said to you,
it doesn't necessarily feel like that, right, he said, this
is a paradoxical moment. It should feel amazing, but it
doesn't feel how I thought it would feel.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah, because early on he had this rather naive idea
that there would be one lab building AI and so
you could take your time about releasing the models, and
you know, if you were worried about safety, you could
just take another six months to test them. And now
you have this race, and you know, the Chinese have
plenty of models, and the other thing, it's not just
a race, it's actually also the open source nature of
(33:43):
these models, where they're being released out into the wild,
and some weird group can just download the model, have
it on their own computer, and then you can't pull
it back anymore. And so there was a big cyber
attack in Mexico recently where all of the actual records
were stolen, and Anthropic realized that its clawed model was
(34:04):
being used. But because that model is proprietary, they could
immediately shut off access and stop the attack. You couldn't
do that with an open weight, open source model. And
yet we have open weight, you know, that's being put
out there, both by Meta and by the Chinese and
by Mestride in France. A lot of open source models
are out there, and so in many ways the way
(34:27):
AI is being deployed is frightening. The obvious safety measures
one might take are not happening. In addition to banning
open source, I think there should be much more powerful
sort of government oversight, so that, just like with a pharmaceutical,
before you release it to be used in people, has
to go through clinical trials. So too, I think there
(34:47):
should be a sort of equivalent of the Food and
Drug Administration, an AI agency that can actually veto the
release of really powerful models. And we don't have that,
and we should have that, and we should be negotiating
with Chin about doing it in both places at once,
because this is a global race and both sides have
to slow down. I was in China recently for eight
days because they always published books faster, so I was
(35:12):
meeting AI leaders, both from industry and from academia, and
I was surprised by how much they do talk about safety.
So I think there is a discussion to be had
with the Chinese about safety, but the US administration of
this moment doesn't want to do that.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
I mean, coming back to the Manhattan Project again, Demis
has said I think that he thinks this may end
in a bunker And what does he mean by that?
And has he primed himself psychologically for an ai Hiroshima
that he may feel in some sense responsible for.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Yeah, I mean, when I was doing the research interfering,
not just Demis, but all the scientists that he works with,
you know, one hundred or something of them. In Deep Mind.
I would hear these references to the bunker come up,
and I assumed it wasn't literally, you know, a real thing.
That Demis wanted to disappear into a bunker at the
moment when he thought the AI models were coming dangerously powerful.
(36:08):
And I would have these dinners every six months with
a friend who had been at Deep Mind but had left,
and I tested this on him one evening and I said, yeah,
surely this is just a metaphor bunker. He can't be serious.
And this guy said, well, actually, you know, I had
my bag packed. It was serious. There was actually this
(36:28):
vision that AI would become so powerful that bad guys
would try and get it off you. So you had
to hide in some place a bit like Los Animals
and develop in seat of isolation and secret, and also
be isolated because you needed maximum focus on the science
to get it right when you were at this moment
of maximum danger because the model was suddenly very powerful.
(36:51):
And that was his vision. Now I think today he
doesn't believe that anymore, because we're so far from a
single lab, you know, midwifing AI. So I think now
he's more inclined to speak of some version of the
Center for European Nuclear Research SERAN, which is a sort
of technical agency that oversees nuclear power on a multinational basis.
(37:15):
I think he would like some sort of global body
to impose rules on what kind of AI should be
let out into the wild. But you know, at the
same time, he knows that politically that's not on the cards,
and he has a sense of timing about when you
should raise these issues, and so you know, whereas Dariama
(37:36):
Day took on the Pentagon by trying to assert safety
principles and then just got rolled, I think their miss
when he does that, is going to feel that he's
got the door is half open, and he can give
it a push and we'll see. You know, of course,
sometimes people keep their capital drive for so long that
they never use it. But we'll see if the moment
(37:57):
comes when he does use it, it'll be very interesting. Bess.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Just close. There was a great review of your book
in the Financial Times which ends with this, Whether and
how Demis ever achieves AGI will form the defining chapters
of his extraordinary and unfinished biography. What did you think
about that? And what is the next chapter for him?
And will you write another follow up book?
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Do you think? You know?
Speaker 3 (38:20):
I tend not to write follow ups about the same thing,
the same person. I prefer to plower of fresh ground.
But look, I mean, you know, Demis is turming fifty
this year. He's got a lot of runway. I'm sure
he'll do more incredible things in the future. So probably
I am offering an interim report. But the advantage you know,
if you wait, I did this before with Alan Greenspann.
(38:40):
I wrote the definitive biography after he retired, and by
that time, you know, people are interested, but less so
than when he's stood in the seat. I think capturing
a portrait of you know, the most interesting figure in
artificial intelligence in real time while he's still in the
seat and he's still doing it is sometimes the fun
of it, right, I mean, who wants to for the
definitive biography in twenty years time? But well, next for him,
(39:03):
you know, I think he's going to carry on running
Google Deep Mind. There's going to be more agentic models
coming out this year. There will be you know, world
models and more robotics coming, there will probably be much
more AI for science, both in terms of drug discovery
and in terms of you know, material sciences, chemistry and
so forth. So I think, you know, one day, I remember,
(39:26):
towards the end of my time interviewing him, he showed
up at the pub and he had a backpack and
he'd pished something out of it, and he got this
little box out and he said, I got to show
you this, and he opened the box up and inside
was the Nobel Prize medal, And either at that meeting
or another one, he said to me, I wonder if
(39:47):
I can get another one. He's not over yet.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
It's a fasting amount of me.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Thank you. It's been great fun to talk for tech Stuff.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
I'm oz Voloscian.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me Julia Nutter and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. The
engineer is Paul Bowman and Jack Insley makes this episode.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Gmail dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
We also love to hear what you think our panels
should cover next time
TechStuff News
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Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.