$👀$ retweetledi
> be demis hassabis
> spawn in london
> age 4, become child chess prodigy
> win chess tournaments
> reach ~2300 elo
> face danish chess champion
> game lasts hours
> position is a forced draw
> too exhausted to see it
> resign
> danish guy laughs and shows the draw
> feel sick to my stomach
> realise something is wrong
> chess is too narrow a problem
> brilliant minds wasting decades on it
> decide not to become a chess pro
> buy a computer with chess winnings
> teach self to program from books
> start hacking on games with friends
> decide to finish school early
> apply to cambridge age 16
> cambridge says you're too young
> forced to take a gap year
> enter a video game coding competition
> win
> get invited to join bullfrog game studio
> too young to be legally employed
> work there anyway
> build ai system inside theme park game
> game becomes a global hit
> turn 17
> offered £1,000,000 to stay and build games
> turn it down
> go to cambridge anyway
> decide games aren't enough
> study computer science
> interested in agi since 2007
> most people laugh at this idea
> realise brain is only form of agi we have
> want to learn more about human brain
> go back to school
> study neuroscience
> realise academia moves too slow
> decide to build a company instead
> start deepmind
> pitch “solve intelligence”
> investors don’t know what that means
> get to meet peter thiel for one minute
> wonder how to convince him
> spend one minute playing chess with him
> pitch "solve intelligence" again
> he invests
> go into total stealth mode for two years
> no website
> secret office
> candidates think it’s a scam
> start to train ai in simulated environments
> train ai with reinforcement learning
> train ai on pong first
> it sucks
> can't win a single point
> keep trying
> wait it won a a point
> wait it's winning every single point
> it actually works
> expand to train on any two-player game
> chess first, then move on to go
> beats world champion at go
> beats pros at starcraft
> games is not enough
> want to push into science
> realise compute is the bottleneck
> know this will take decades
> google offers ~$400m
> not the highest price
> but they offer unlimited compute
> accept
> refuse to become a product team
> stay in research mode
> determined to use ai for good
> need to figure out what's next
> land on protein folding
> 50-year-old unsolved science problem
> many great minds have tried and failed
> "good luck"
> start up alphafold
> try to solve protein folding
> humans take years to find 1 protein structure
> alphafold can find ~5 per day
> submit results, win competition
> not good enough
> hire more scientists
> rebuild it
> go from solving one per day to millions per day
> create invaluable system
> pharma would pay anything
> have to decide what to do with this
> could sell access for usage
> maybe make it a paid service
> remember childhood chess tournament
> remember why we built this
> decide to give it away all away for free
> publish all known protein structures publicly
> win nobel peace prize
> just the beginning towards agi
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