David Senra@FoundersPodcast
This episode is about a once-in-a-generation mind working on what may be the most important problem in history.
It's based on the new book The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby.
(0:00) This is the most crazy, ferocious corporate battle that we've ever seen.
(2:21) Intelligence is fundamental; it is the root of all else.
(3:27) When Demis founded DeepMind almost every investor turned him away.
(4:50) Demis is a missionary entrepreneur and out-of-the-box scientist who, through brilliance and extraordinary drive, emerges as the right person for a particular moment.
(6:20) I sit at my desk at 2 a.m., and I feel like reality is staring at me, screaming at me, literally screaming at me, trying to tell me something if I could just listen hard enough. That's how I feel every day, so you can see why I'm trying to build AI. I've felt that since I was very young that there's a deep, deep mystery about what's going on here.
(7:10) Demis, who blazed the trail followed by rivals, is decent and public-spirited and wants the best for humanity. He has ego; he is fearsomely competitive, but his goal is scientific enlightenment, not money or power.
(9:49) Demis has an extraordinary level of determination, unlike pretty much anybody. Astonishing, incredible determination. That's his most defining characteristic: just unbelievable determination. He works, sleeps, eats, breathes the mission 24 hours a day to a degree that I haven't seen with other people.
(10:48) There is no 50% mode in Demis. There is not even a 99% mode in Demis. There is only 100%.
(14:39) The slightly warped way I took that was: how do you know you've done your best? The only way I could know is basically if I push myself to the point just before death, because that is literally when you have done your best.
(19:07) When he signed up for a game he liked to feel that he could win.
(20:44) He saw no reason not to start a company and so he did.
(22:40) Demis on what losing feels like to him: It's like my soul is on fire.
(25:34) Demis was an extreme case of an authentic entrepreneur, not a mercenary who starts with a desire to get rich from a startup then casts around for a plausible idea, but rather a missionary who feels compelled to work on a particular challenge then starts a company as a way of tackling it.
(25:57) The good thing about missionaries is that they never quit. Even if they have to work around the clock and pay themselves nothing. They will keep obsessing about the problem.
(26:08) Peter Thiel on Demis: “I always say that people aren't really entrepreneurs in the abstract, but there's maybe one great company that somebody has in them. It was Demis's destiny to build this one.”
(26:30) "If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence so machines can learn, that would be worth 10 Microsofts." — Bill Gates
(32:09) We only wanted hardcore believers. We would go to conferences and tell people we are starting an AGI company. 80% of the people would roll their eyes at us, literally roll their eyes at us and turn around and walk away. We figured that this was a very efficient way to discover who we should be talking to.
(32:50) Blessed are those who believed before there was any evidence.
(34:17) The way Demis saw things, true general intelligence would make almost anything possible, surpassing the internet, the printing press, or even the industrial revolution in importance.
(35:22) Elon had declared that humans needed to colonize Mars in case disaster struck Earth. Demis had countered that killer AI robots might be one such disaster, but that the AI could obviously follow humans to Mars if it wanted to.
(36:25) Peter Thiel felt instinctively suspicious of a fellow chess player. A man who had spent his formative years mentally crushing opponents should be treated with caution, Thiel reckoned.
(37:07) I'm talking about the biggest invention ever, and investors keep coming back to "Where's the widget?" and I'm like, "I'm going to revolutionize all widgets, so I can pick you a random widget if you want me to, but you obviously haven't got the point if you're asking me this."
(37:42) He [Larry Page] was basically telling me, maybe you could build a company like Google, but it would take the best part of your career. If my real mission was to build AGI, then why don't I use all the resources that he's accumulated? I thought that was a pretty good argument.
(38:50) Elon tries to buy DeepMind
(42:33) Sam Altman emails Elon: "I've been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first."
(43:18) If you have powerful people who are able to understand the impact of the technology, they're not just gonna sit on the sidelines.
(44:08) Humans had not understood how little they had understood.
(44:31) As Peter Thiel said of Demis, "Geniuses are seldom brilliant in a general way. They tend to be brilliantly suited to a particular mission."
(46:50) Demis was far more original and far more of a contrarian than most of the self-identified contrarians of Silicon Valley.
(48:11) When Demis solves something big, he doesn't pause to spend much time savoring the achievement.
(48:49) You definitely can't crack a hard problem if the person leading the team thinks it's not possible.
(54:05) This is my whole life's work. I have to do what's necessary. The mission is in me; it's infused in me. You can't separate it from me.
(54:28) Demis's core theme is that money and power were not ends in themselves. They were a means to scientific knowledge.
