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AI is the biggest technology shift of our lifetime. This show is about how to profit from it together.
Each week I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and Content, the ones figuring this out in real time.
I’m also building an AI content business myself and share the lessons I learn along the way.
WHAT WE COVER
The Titans -- How companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI are moving, and why their decisions matter.
The Incumbents -- How content giants like Disney, News Corp, Universal Music Group, and Reddit are responding to AI, and what it means for creators and publishers.
The Playbook -- Real lessons on AI business models, content strategy, creativity, IP licensing, distribution, and getting paid.
Family & Our Future -- Every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation.
ABOUT YOUR HOST
Rob Kelly has interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, helped pioneer early web content licensing, and built multiple companies with more than $100 million in total sales. His work has appeared on CNBC, CNN, TIME, and Entrepreneur.
Thanks! -Rob
I'm Rob Kelly, this is Media and the Machine, a show about the biggest technology shift of our lifetime and how to profit from it. Each week, I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and content, the ones figuring this out in real time. I'm also building an AI content business myself and share lessons of what I learned along the way. You know, life's funny. I began my career lucky enough to interview leaders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Rob Kelly:Then I went on to be a three time founder and CEO, driving a $100,000,000 plus in revenue and some failures too. And now I'm back at the table, interviewing this new world's current and future leaders. This isn't only a business story, it's a human one. So every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. We'll figure this out together from the inside.
Rob Kelly:Welcome to Media and the Machine. There are only a handful of people in the world truly leading the AI race, and I wanna understand the humans behind the hype. People like Sam Altman at OpenAI, Dario Amodei at Anthropic, Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman at Microsoft AI, and Elon Musk through xAI. The leaders behind the companies building the models, buying the chips, and shaping the rules of AI. So every few episodes, I'm gonna profile one of these AI leaders through the best book biography I can find.
Rob Kelly:Where did they come from? What do they believe? What kind of future are they trying to build? After all, their decisions are shaping the future of business and humanity. Today, I profiled Demis Hassabis, co founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, doing so through what I think is the most comprehensive biography about Demis, The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby.
Rob Kelly:Here's what legendary venture capitalist Mike Moritz had to say about this book. With his customary flair, Malby relays the enchanting tale of how the British son of a Chinese Singaporean mother and Greek Cypriot fathers led his team to the pole position in the AI race and picked up a Nobel Prize along the way. Sebastian spent thirty hours interviewing Demis and did interviews with a 100 plus people who know him, including his co founders, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman as well as Anthropic co founder Dario Amodei, OpenAI co founder Ilya Sutskever, Meta's former head of AI, Yann Lecun, and early DeepMind investors, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. The book also has transcribed conversations from Sam Altman and Elon Musk that relate to Demis. I wanna start with the single excerpt from the book that I think explains Demis the best.
Rob Kelly:There are a ton of others and short excerpts here and there, but this one says a lot. Malby is with him in the North London Park in the summer two thousand twenty three near where Demis grew up. I am first and foremost a scientist, Hassabis began. My goal is to understand nature. But doing science is sort of like reading the mind of God.
Rob Kelly:Understanding the deep mystery of the universe is my religion, kind of. Computers are just bits of sand and copper, Hassabis continued, now sounding more urgent. Why should these combine to do anything? I mean, it's absurd. The electrons move around, and then that creates an AI system that can defeat a go master.
Rob Kelly:Why should that be possible? We can build systems that detect black holes colliding more than a billion years ago. I mean, what is this? What the hell is going on here? I sit at my desk at 2AM 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.
Rob Kelly:That's how I feel every day. So you can see why I'm trying to build AI. I felt that since I was very young, that there's a deep deep mystery about what's going on here. You can frame it how you want. You can call this God's design, or you can just say it's nature.
Rob Kelly:I'm open minded about the description, and I don't know what the answers will turn out to be. But at the moment, we don't really know what time is or gravity is or any of these things. So there is a mystery waiting to be solved, and it encompasses just about everything. I would like to understand this before I croak. There's some unique things about Demis that interest me versus the other AI CEOs.
Rob Kelly:First, he's the longest tenured AI CEO. He started in 2010. He's also the only major AI CEO outside Silicon Valley. He was born in London and insisted on staying there even after Google bought his company, DeepMind, for $650,000,000. He talked his way into remaining in London.
Rob Kelly:Unlike most of other AI bosses, Demis has a very visible track record in science and health care through AlphaFold. He's not the only CEO working near health care, but he's the clearest case of one whose legacy is already tied to medicine and biology. And finally, he seems less motivated by power and money than any other major AI CEO, not because he lacks ego, but because his ego seems more aimed at legacy and solving intelligence itself. To understand Demis better, you gotta look at his parents and his early childhood. His mother had grown up in poverty, spending part of her childhood at least as an orphan on the streets of Singapore, eventually finding shelter with a relative and moving to London to study nursing.
Rob Kelly:Demis' father had been the first from his family to attend university, but he was too much of a bohemian free spirit to get into any sort of office job. He was an aspiring singer songwriter and sold toys out of the backseat of a red Volkswagen van. I think it's fair to say Demis was a child prodigy. When he was four, he climbed up on a chair to watch his father play chess against his uncle. Within a few weeks, he had mastered the game well enough to defeat adults.
Rob Kelly:At five, he started to compete in tournaments sitting on a telephone book on top of two stacked chairs so he can get his head above the table. When Demis was six, he qualified to compete in the British under fourteen championship, winning two of his matches before falling asleep at the table when a game stretched into the evening time, way past his bedtime. For the next half dozen years, Demis and his dad would travel around England competing in chess tournaments. Sometimes the father son duo spent the night in sleeping bags laid out over the engine at the back of the VW. Other times, they found a cheap hostel and shared a bunk bed.
Rob Kelly:If Demis won the tournament, the prize money would cover the hostel fees. But this stressed out his mom. Demis would say, she grew up in absolute poverty. I imagine my parents had a lot of arguments about money because we didn't have much. At 13, he reached the rank of chess master and was the second strongest competitor in his age group worldwide.
Rob Kelly:Hassabis was second only to Judith Polgar, the Hungarian superstar who went on to become a top 10 player and the strongest woman chess player of all time. Demis' dad was tough on him when he lost. There was one time I was a rook up and then lost horribly, and my dad went mental, Hassabis remembered. He was screaming. How could you have done this?
Rob Kelly:This is unbelievable. How could you have just thrown this away? It was just awful. We were out in some hostel, he was going on about this screaming. And this used to be a fairly regular occurrence with my dad.
Rob Kelly:So I said to him, this is ridiculous. I obviously tried my best. I'm not intentionally losing. And that was that. I wasn't gonna take it anymore.
Rob Kelly:That was the last time I remember him screaming at me, whereas he used to all the time before. But from that, Demis seemed to take a literal interpretation of doing your best. Quote, the only way I could know if I'm doing my best is basically if I push myself to the point just before death, because that is literally when you've done your best. If you die by die, mean burnout or something, then you've slightly overdone it. It's like running a marathon.
Rob Kelly:You have to basically fall over the line, and then ideally, you should be hospitalized but not dead. That's when you can say you've done your best. If you've got any energy left, you're still standing, maybe you could have tried harder. That's how I took it. I must have been about nine or 10.
Rob Kelly:At age 12, Demis had an epiphany of sorts. This would put him on the path towards AI eventually. Hassabis was doing battle in an international competition near Liechtenstein. The way he remembers the episode, he was pitted against an experienced German master, a man old enough to be his father. The German was a chain smoker, and the match stretched on for almost ten hours, entering in an unusual endgame.
Rob Kelly:Hassabis still had his queen. The German had a rook, bishop, and knight. Time ticked by as the pieces circled the board, and the tournament hall gradually emptied as kings were cornered and toppled on the other tables around them. Then eventually, the equilibrium broke. The German trapped Hassabis' king.
Rob Kelly:Checkmate looked inevitable. Shocked and physically exhausted, Hassabis capitulated. Immediately, his opponent leaped to his feet. Why have you resigned? Hassabis remembers him asking.
Rob Kelly:With a flourish, the victor showed the boy the move he should have made. If Hassabis had sacrificed his queen, the match would have ended in a stalemate. The German friends crowded around and joined in the jeering. For the rest of the day, Hassabis felt sick to his stomach, but the next morning, he experienced an epiphany. That tournament hall near Liechtenstein had been packed with brilliant minds, dueling over black and white squares until stamina was drained to nothing.
Rob Kelly:Surely, that immense collective mental effort should have been harnessed to some higher cause. Science say or medicine? I thought we were wasting our minds, Hassabis said later. For nearly all his conscious life, Hassabis thought he would be on the path to playing chess forever. But now Hassabis resolved that there must be something more, a mission, a purpose.
Rob Kelly:Demis quit focusing just on chess to compete in other games, and his versatility was even more impressive. He'd later gone to win the International MIND Sports Olympiad five straight years. That meant he was among the best in the world at a combination of games that included chess, of course, Go, Othello, diplomacy, and backgammon. Demis soon decided he didn't just wanna play games, he wanted to build them. At age 12, he got a Commodore Amiga.
Rob Kelly:He quickly built an app that could beat his younger brother at Othello. By age 15, Demis talked his way into working for Bullfrog, one of the top game studios in Europe. Bullfrog's founder was Peter Molyneux, a, quote, big eared, big talking, lanky creative who did not just design games, he invented entire new genres of games, notably the god games. Demis quickly won over Molyneux and was assigned a desk right next to him. The following winter, Demis won admission to the University of Cambridge where he'd say computer science.
Rob Kelly:The college authorities ruled that although he was academically ready, at 16, he was too young to enroll, so he should find something else to occupy himself for the next year or so. This suited Demis just fine. He'd graduate from high school a year early and work for Bullfrog until Cambridge is ready for him. Molyneux was now embarking on a brand new genre busting game called theme park. Together with a handful of other young employees, Demis moved into Molyneux's eccentric country house, mysterious old rectory with hidden doors and secret passages and plenty of gear for gaming.
Rob Kelly:Demis rose to Molyneux's challenge, packing theme park full of imaginative features. For instance, if the player put extra salt on the french fries, the visitors would feel thirsty and soft drink sales would rocket. If the player made the roller coasters too scary, the digital riders would vomit. Not scary enough, and thrill seeking customers would grow disappointed. At 17, Malinu gave Demis a copy of Gerdell Escher Bach.
Rob Kelly:Hofstadter held the controversial position that human intelligence and computer intelligence are virtually indistinguishable. Hofstadter made points that really resonated with Demis. For instance, that human brains like computer brains work on trickles of electricity. When they form an opinion or conceive a plan, they are responding to the chemical equivalent of ones and zeros. Only if one keeps on bashing up against this disturbing fact can one slowly begin to develop a feel for the way out of the mystery of consciousness, that the key is not the stuff out of which brains are made, but the patterns that can come to exist inside the stuff of a brain.
Rob Kelly:This impacted Demis' software development at Bullfrog. Quote, we were discussing AI all the time, Hassabis recalled, how it could help the games, what it would take to build it, as in build AI. Around this time, Molyneux took Demis to a conference on AI in The US. They showed a Carnegie Mellon professor their work so far on the theme park. He fell off his chair, Hassabis recalled.
Rob Kelly:He was like, what is this? Who are you guys? And I showed him all the different properties that we were modeling, how happy the characters were feeling, how sad, how thirsty, how hungry, how much money did they have, who were their friends, all that was simulated in this massively complicated theme park world, and he couldn't believe it. Demis recalls, I decided then and there I was gonna dedicate my career to working on AI. I already had the kernel of the idea for what would eventually become DeepMind.
Rob Kelly:At 18, Demis quit Bullfrog to stay at Cambridge. Bullfrog's founder, Molyneux, wrote out a check for £500,000. That'd be about $1,700,000 in today's money. He wrote out the check to Hassabis to keep making games. Hassabis refused to cash the check.
Rob Kelly:I see this as a pivotal moment. Demis chooses science over money. We're gonna talk more about this later. Not all AI CEOs seem as motivated by science and legacy and achievement as Demis. Demis attended Cambridge in large part due to a film called Life Story that celebrates scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, who met at the university where they took walks and sat at pubs to speculate about DNA and becoming famous.
Rob Kelly:They would later win the Nobel Prize for discovering the double helix structure of DNA. It was the thrill of science that drove Demis towards Cambridge. Here's an excerpt from the movie Life Story. What's fun? Watson asks Crick early on in the movie.
Rob Kelly:Oh, the big questions, Crick responds. What is man? What is life? How did we come to be the way that we are? For a while after that fateful game in Liechtenstein, Hassabis had thought seriously about a career in theoretical physics.
Rob Kelly:Here was a field that seemed to grapple with the biggest possible questions, the nature of the universe, the building blocks of reality. Thrilling though this prospect seemed, Hassabis was also practical. When he signed up for a game, he liked to feel that he could win, and physics seemed like a long shot. The way he saw things, all physicists since Einstein had ultimately come up short. It failed to hit on the theory that explained all of reality.
Rob Kelly:Quote, even Richard Feynman couldn't do it, Demis said. Matter of fact, he died without understanding everything. I realized that however good I was gonna be, I was unlikely to surpass him. Following this line of thought, Demis hit upon a strategy. He resolved to go after the infinite mysteries of physics with the help of artificial intelligence.
Rob Kelly:Science had always advanced courtesy of new tools. Telescopes had allowed humans to peer into space. X-ray machines that made it possible to see into humans without invasive surgery, AI, in Demis' opinion, would be the ultimate lever, an extension not merely of vision, but of the capacity for understanding. At Cambridge, Demis was considered affable, likable. As his classmate Ben Coppner remembers, Demis didn't walk into the room and seem terrifying or aloof or weird or anything.
Rob Kelly:He had to relax, put people at ease kind of confidence, a general confidence, let's say. And he could still beat everyone at games from chest to backgammon and even table football. That's called foosball in The US. I think highly confident is probably the best way to describe Demis. I'm looking at a quote here directly from Demis.
Rob Kelly:I was the best table football player at Cambridge pretty much, Hassabis remembered. I could shoot with my left hand from the midfield with a lot of control, so I had something quite special. You know, there's a professional scene in The US, and even they don't shoot like that. You get the feeling Demis was being literal and accurate, was the best foosball player at Cambridge and had no problem saying it. Bordering on cocky, but I'd just call it highly confident.
Rob Kelly:Toward the end of his time at Cambridge, Hassabis had confided to friends that to pursue his dream of building AI, he planned to found a company. It was a shocking idea. Entrepreneurship was a foreign concept on the Cambridge campus. Britain had no equivalent to Silicon Valley. If you had looked at the students and asked, who's gonna set up a company?
Rob Kelly:The answer would have been nobody, one of Hassabis' contemporaries recalled. It was like, who are you gonna work for, or what PhD are you interested in? Of course, you don't set up a company. Perhaps thanks to his exposure to Molyneux, perhaps also to the influence of his free spirited father, Hassabis was an exception. He saw no reason not to start a company, and so he did.
Rob Kelly:So now it's early nineteen ninety eight. Demis is 21 years old, and he starts a company called Elixir Studios. This is a game studio. But there is some clear documentations suggesting that Demis is not trying to just build games for the sake of building games, but because he wants to build AI. So explaining his vision over dinner at Cambridge, Hassabis had laid out a plan to build powerful AI by combining the rigor of academia with the hustle of the private sector.
Rob Kelly:Academia was attractive for its commitment to deep science. Businesses were attractive because they could incentivize teams and sprint to meet deadlines. That's from a dinner conversation between Demis and Ben Coppin while at Cambridge. So Demis recruits his old Cambridge classmate David Silver for Elixir, and he also recruits two more cofounders, Joe McDonough, who he had interviewed at Bullfrog, and a gentleman named Tim Clark. So at Elixir, they worked on a game called Republic.
Rob Kelly:It was about a government dictator, and Haspis envisioned over a million individual living, breathing people with their own daily routines and beliefs and loyalties. Gaming magazine Edge suggested it was one of the most ambitious computer games ever, quote. Long term, I wanna be the best games developer in the world, Demis told The Guardian. And Republic, the game they made, definitely got a lot of great press. They went to e three, the gaming conference in LA.
Rob Kelly:They won the best upcoming game, even though they hadn't finished the game completely. But Elixir failed to raise the big VC funding that Demis had wanted. They had to rely on a game publisher called Eidos, and the computer technology at that point just could not support Demis' lofty ambitions. The game experienced a lot of delays. There's a good quote from Demis years later on this time period.
Rob Kelly:Quote, who would have thought that you can actually inspire people too much? He reflected years later. Well, you can because you can get to the point where you are deluding your team, and then they are deluding you also. It's like, I'm making the judgment this is possible because the engineers are telling me it's possible, but they're only telling me it's possible because I've overinspired them, Hassabis said. So in fact, none of us is getting real feedback.
Rob Kelly:After seven years, Elixir would shut down. Hassabis recalls this period as, quote, probably the hardest time in my life. I was in pieces. And he decided that the brain was the, quote, existence proof that underpinned AI endeavors. It followed that to build artificial intelligence, one should understand human intelligence first.
Rob Kelly:Following this logic, Hassabis resolved to do a PhD in neuroscience, and he won acceptance to the doctoral program at the University College London. Demis has some great points about the importance of neuroscience. Quote, physics explain the external world, neuroscience explains human beings' internal world. The stuff that physicists studied, matter, energy, time, was ultimately less real than the bits of information pulsing between neurons. As part of his work at University College London, Hassabis also ended up doing some postdoctoral projects at MIT and Harvard.
Rob Kelly:His MIT supervisor, Thomas Paggio, was a physicist turned computational neuroscientist. It was interesting to share what, Poggio said about Hassabis. Poggio would say that of the many Nobel Prize winners he had encountered, the majority were both brilliant and lucky. Lucky in the sense that they had chosen a research problem that turned out to be both consequential and solvable. But a handful of Nobel laureates, Poggio said, were so exceptionally gifted that they were gonna win the prize no matter what.
Rob Kelly:In this category, Poggio plays the physicist Richard Feynman, the biologist Francis Crick, and his postdoctoral student Demis Hassabis. Also around this time, Demis got to meet Jeff Hinton, later his company would be acquired by Google as well. Hinton had labored on his deep neural networks for a quarter of a century, exhibiting what Padio called a religious belief in their potential. In 2009, around the time he met Hassabis, Hinton found to his astonishment that Hassabis was as cocky as he was. Quote, Demis is the only person I've ever met who's more competitive than me.
Rob Kelly:October 2009, Hassabis meets Shane Legg. This is in the elevators at the Gatsby unit of University College London. Legg had his suitcases and was off to the Singularity Summit in New York. And amazingly, this point, Hassabis has not heard of this yet. Legg was famous for persuading Ben Gertzel to change his book title that was on AI to artificial general intelligence.
Rob Kelly:It was originally titled Real AI, and so Shane actually coined the phrase AGI, artificial general intelligence. I'm gonna put in Hassabis' words just how important this meeting was. It was amazing to find shame because it's like finding an oasis. Right? Until then, as far as I knew, I was the only person thinking about these subjects.
Rob Kelly:It means AI. I mean, there were other people interested in AI, like David Silver, but I've got them interested. I'm good at galvanizing people, so I can't take that as an independent measure of whether I'm really onto something. There's the scientist in Demis. So to find someone who'd had an independent path, who would come to the same conclusion, that was a very powerful corroboration.
Rob Kelly:I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. He goes on, just to add some depth to how important Shane Legg is to Demis' future and to DeepMind. Quote, here was a guy who dedicated independently from me his entire life to this mission. That's why we had both ended up at The Gatsby, because we were kinda looking for each other. Neither of us knew what the other one would be like, but we were looking.
Rob Kelly:Shane had left New Zealand, worked with Ben Gortzold on academia, and eventually he came to The Gatsby for the same reason I was there, because it was one of the only places in the world that was combining neuroscience and machine learning. And so we both must have thought that there had to be interesting like minded people there, and it turned out there weren't that many. But there was one, and that was enough. So Shane Legg became cofounder number one, you could call it, for DeepMind, in addition to Demis, of course. Later on, we'll get into how they broke up their stock initially.
Rob Kelly:It's fascinating. It says a lot about Demis. It might surprise you. So Demis wanted more backup to Shane's horsepower. So he recruited Mustafa Suleyman.
Rob Kelly:And if Mustafa sounds familiar, I did a profile of Mustafa. He's now head of Microsoft AI. I did that. It's called Inside the Mind of Mustafa Suliman. The Coming Wave book is the biography I used for that.
Rob Kelly:So that was my first profile of an AI leader. But in short, basically, Moose, as he's known to friends, had befriended George Hassabis, Demis' younger brother, had become a family friend. And Moose was very interested in impacting social change, and Hassabis told him AI was the best bet basically to do that and recruited Mustafa. One thing that ramped up Demis' interest in Moose was that Moose sent Demis an article in Wired about Google cofounder Sergey Brin, how he's pouring part of his $15,000,000,000 net worth into computational medicine. Perhaps Sergey was the type of investor Demis needed.
Rob Kelly:Demis told Moose that he was preparing a pitch for another billionaire at the upcoming Singularity Summit. Could Moose help flesh it out and draft the final document to help basically attract Sergei Brin and this other billionaire? That billionaire was Peter Kiel, by the way, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, the first outside investor in Facebook and a large early investor in Elon Musk's SpaceX by that point. I think it's really interesting how Demis broke down the stock for the three of them. It says a lot about Demis and his own ideas about self worth.
Rob Kelly:So Demis gave himself these are all estimates, around 84.6%. He gave Shane Legg 9.4% roughly, and Mustafa Moose 6%. Now I know this sounds heavily weighted towards Demis. Obviously, is. My take on this is that Demis really wanted them to feel like they had true, sort of at least co founder status for this new AGI mission.
Rob Kelly:And at the same time, Demis knew his value. He was the catalyst for this. The initial ideas were his. He recruited the two of them, and the distribution shows it. I think the theme here is, again, highly highly confident individual that he deserves that much, but he was able to talk the two of them into it.
Rob Kelly:And my personal take is he did not do this purely for money, monetary gain. He did it for control. So now let's talk about this Singularity Summit where the pitches to the at least one billionaire were going to happen. So this is 08/14/2010, and Demis and Shane had secured speaking roles. At this point, the Singularity Summit is is a pretty small group.
Rob Kelly:There's nothing about the numbers who attended, but still not a major conference by any means. The billionaire Peter Thiel had financed at least in part the Singularity gatherings and believing it might generate some wacky but high potential bets. After all, it would take just one investment to pay off multiple times over. That is the formula for VC, venture capital. So Demis and Shane were speaking.
Rob Kelly:Moose, Mustafa Moose Suleyman came along for the ride sleeping on a couch in Hassabis' hotel room. But even though it's a relatively small conference and Thiel was financing it, while they're at the summit, Demis and Shane saw no signs of Thiel. Not on stage, not in attendance. So Shane knew that the previous year, was an after party that Thiel threw for conference speakers at his house. It's in San Francisco.
Rob Kelly:Also, previous year, Legge had befriended Eliezer Yudkowski. I'd say that slow to get his name right. He's an early pioneer in AI who had known Thiel for ten years. Yudkowski walked Demis and Shane over to Thiel. And Yudkowski says to Thiel, these are some of the smartest guys in the whole field of AI, and they're starting a really ambitious company.
Rob Kelly:Now I'm reading excerpt from the book directly from Demis. I was preparing for that meeting, this is with Teal, for a year, he said later. Instead of pitching Teal with yet another startup story and doing so in the middle of a crowded party with thirty seconds in which to blurred above the noise, he hooked Teal with chess, observing that there was a deep tension between the bishop and the knight. So Peter Thiel is famously a very excellent chess player. So observing there was a deep tension between the bishop and the knight with the two pieces carrying the same value yet possessing vastly different capabilities.
Rob Kelly:Sure enough, this gambit was enough to open up the board. After a brief back and forth, Teal invited Hassabis and Leg over to his home the next day to explain their ambitious venture. When the duo showed up to make their pitch, Teal greeted them in his work hat gear. He was still sweating. His butler brought him a Diet Coke.
Rob Kelly:He had a grave expression. I'm still reading for the book. Hassabis explained his vision for a company that would build powerful AI drawing on the latest insights from neuroscience and capitalizing on the explosion in computing power. This is directly from interviews with Thiel. This might be a bit much, Thiel thought to himself.
Rob Kelly:Still, Yudkowsky's endorsement meant a lot. Thiel had known Yudkowsky for half a dozen years, and DeepMind was the first company that he had recommended. Keele began to think this project was a plus on the science and maybe f on the business model. But he also had a further thought. Hassabis was an extreme case of what venture capitalists call, quote, an authentic entrepreneur.
Rob Kelly:Not a mercenary who starts with a desire to get rich from a start up, then cast around for a plausible idea, rather a missionary who feels compelled to work on a particular challenge, then starts a company as a way of tackling it. 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. I always think that people aren't really entrepreneurs in the abstract, but there's maybe one great company that somebody has in them, Teal reflected. It was Demis' destiny to build this one.
Rob Kelly:Teal told his visitors to come back in a few weeks to pitch his partners at Founders Fund, that's his venture capital firm. He seemed curious but wary. When Demis and Shane came back in a few weeks, they met with the Founders Fund futurist by the name of Luke Nosek. He was an engineer and friend of Peter Thiel since the formation of PayPal. He was also the Founders Fund partner responsible for the team's most far out wagers, notably SpaceX and Halcyon.
Rob Kelly:As Nocek put it, here was the first person who actually seemed really, really competent, really, really brilliant, and dedicated to building AGI. I'd met people before who had the same goal, but I didn't believe they could do it. And it's no say who ends up introducing Demis and team to Elon Musk, cofounder of SpaceX. By December 2010, Founders Fund would invest 2,300,000 in DeepMind in exchange for a little bit less than half the company. By the way, remember earlier when I mentioned Demis had given himself 84.6%?
Rob Kelly:It's very likely that he had done this math of venture capital, which if he gave up a little less than half the company, this still put Demis as the top shareholder with maybe somewhere around 50%. And again, I'm estimating, but around 50% ownership. DeepMind would later get additional funding from the Founders Fund, another 7,900,000, and also Skype cofounder Jan Kalen for 2,000,000. And by the way, Jan invested not for financial gain, but for safety. He was very worried about AI.
Rob Kelly:So as the money started to pour in from investors into DeepMind, Demis recruited a handful of great folks, but there were two notable people who turned him down. One is Ilya Sutskever. Ilya is famous for going on to cofound OpenAI, and also Jan Lecun, who ended up heading up Meta's AI, although he has recently left. Jan Lecun said, quote, this is yet another company that claims AGI is just around the corner, and it's complete BS. As a fellow cofounder and CEO, I was really interested in Hassabis' three ideas on what the DeepMind platform needed.
Rob Kelly:Demis says the first was conviction. Nobody could say how AGI was gonna be built, but Hassabis insisted that it could be built. The existence of the human brain proved that general intelligence was possible. Moreover, Hassabis understood that sense of conviction had to permeate his research team. Otherwise, morale would flag and nobody would achieve anything.
Rob Kelly:In other words, he didn't want in the early days, there were prestigious figures such as Yan Lecun deriding AGI ambition as crazy. Demis says every scientist at the company needed to have faith AGI was possible. So that's number one, conviction. Number two, the second thing was DeepMind needed time. Venture investors' patience is finite.
Rob Kelly:But with that in mind, Hassabis set out to extend DeepMind's research runway by generating revenue from side projects. So notice how this is different than what he did with Elixir. At Elixir, he went after one kinda moon shot of a video game, Republic, it was called. For example, in 2011, he assigned a small team to come up with a commercial video game. In early two thousand twelve, he revived his old ideas on recommendation algorithms.
Rob Kelly:By now, deep learning was helping to do that. And Moose took the lead on hiring a team to apply that technology to fashion retailing, where a shopper could input an image of a dress, for instance, and get back recommendations. And the third thing that DeepMind needed, according to Demis, was a culture that brought out the best from its scientists. And by their own emissions, there were some sort of far out eccentric folks on the early team. One of the early team members, Wierstra, marveled that Demis is able to talk to each person at the right level.
Rob Kelly:He knows immediately what's good about each individual. But some of the researchers at DeepMind were so unusual that Demis had to hire glue people, as he called them. Their job was to nurture the talent, compensate for their social deficiencies. While researchers who are almost always brilliant, some might be incapable of administrative coordination or even oral communication. Someone look colleagues in the eye.
Rob Kelly:Wierzha describes this. Look. We have people who are so socially awkward that they lock themselves up in the bathroom for hours on end, but then they come out of that bathroom with a brilliant insight. If you can find these people and be gentle to them and mother them, you get something great, which other companies are missing. The author Malaby pushed back on Weirshed and noted that the researchers were almost all men and that the glue people, program managers, were often women.
Rob Kelly:And Weirshed just said, yep. They're all men, but many are very awkward men. So, yeah, I'm sure it felt uncomfortable to some people. On the other hand, these men had felt uncomfortable about themselves all their lives, and we created an institution for them to thrive in. There's a law of comparative advantage.
Rob Kelly:You don't have to struggle with your social skills. You shine at what you're good at. Helen King, the first project manager to join DeepMind recalls that things were so intensely quiet, and the hush was so intense that she could hear the water clicking through the ancient heating pipes. To preserve this library environment, phone calls and company meetings were shifted out into the garden square. When the weather was bad, the DeepMinders did phone calls from the closet with the computer servers.
Rob Kelly:And Demis' own work hours were very unusual. He'd worked the normal office hours, and then he went home and worked from 10PM to 4AM. Another key move that Demis made was to use an external yardstick to measure things. A lot of companies instead use their own internal measurements to measure what sort of progress they're making, and they hit on the perfect environment for testing an agent, an AI agent that is, the suite of video games designed in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties by the pioneering company Atari. The Atari games had a constantly updated score, giving AI the feedback needed to play better, and a bonus was that investors grew up playing Space Invaders, Breakout, and a bunch of other Atari games.
Rob Kelly:So if you had an AI that mastered those games, that'd be instantly appealing. So in 2013, a early DeepMind hire, Vlad Niek, showed up at Harrah's Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino at for the NIPS conference, major AI conference at the time. And he was gonna show what was called DeepQ Network, DQN. Rumor had gotten around that DeepMind was gonna show something interesting. So Vlad took the audience through he basically did it just through videos, but he showed off how their AI agent was able to beat SeaQuest and Space Invaders.
Rob Kelly:Now I'm gonna read from the book. But the grand finale came with the game of Breakout. This is Atari's game, which involved batting a ball against a wall of bricks, gradually destroying them. The AI agent had figured out the old trick for winning with maximum efficiency. First cut a tunnel through the bricks, then send the ball through the tunnel so that it ricochets off the back wall, zapping multiple bricks without the player having to do anything.
Rob Kelly:The room went completely silent, David Silver remembers. For every game, the same agent had learned something completely different. People were just blown away. It was a turning point. Looking back on this triumph, Silver had noted how Hassabis had grown since experienced with Elixir.
Rob Kelly:Remember back his previous start up? In both cases, Hassabis had announced a maximalist ambition, but in the case of DeepMind, he had also figured out a ladder that led to his destination. At Elixir, he had plunged his company straight into making the most complex video game ever, and the Overreach had doomed the project. At DeepMind, the ultimate goal was even grander, but Hassabis had let people tinker while he was building out the scientific team, not setting a demanding goal for them. Then once the team had assembled, Hassabis had shown exquisite judgment.
Rob Kelly:In choosing the Atari challenge, he had understood that the moment to fuse deep learning and reinforcement learning had arrived. The result was another ImageNet moment. That was a big breakthrough on AI representing cats and other images, not just for vision, but for agents. In the year leading up to that NIPS conference, Tari demo that blew people away, there were some really key things that happened involving Elon Musk and Larry Page, cofounder of Google. So I wanted to bring those up.
Rob Kelly:And again, this is important to know how Demis got connected with them and their take on Demis and vice versa. I'm gonna give you some highlights of what happened. So it was around 10/08/2012, back to Luke Nosek of Founders Fund. So Nosek had flown back to California on Musk's private jet. This was after one of the SpaceX launches.
Rob Kelly:Nosek flew back to California on Musk's private jet accompanied by Larry Page, the cofounder and CEO of Google. At one point on the flight home, the conversation turned to AI. Page's father, Carl, had studied primitive neural networks in the nineteen sixties. This was also around the time that Google was eyeing Geoffrey Hinton's company and acquiring them, which they did eventually do. When Larry Page dropped a hint about his acquisition plans, this is of Geoffrey Hinton, not DeepMind, Elon Musk tried to one up him.
Rob Kelly:Thanks to the Nosek connection, Musk had met Hassabis at a Founders Fund retreat, and Hassabis had followed up with a visit to SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. So I wanted to share Peter Thiel's take on when Elon Musk met Demis Hassabis. This is at a founder's fun retreat. This would be at SpaceX in Hawthorne, California circa 2012. As they ate lunch together in the factory canteen with cranes moving vast pieces of rocket overhead, Musk and Hassabis had discussed which mission mattered most, space travel, which might turn humanity into a multiplanetary species, or developing AGI, which might empower humanity to solve any and all problems.
Rob Kelly:Musk had declared that humans need to colonize Mars in case disaster struck Earth. Hassabis 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. The two men had forged a competitive friendship, and Musk had decided that Hassabis was right. Powerful artificial intelligence might indeed be more consequential than spaceflight. Anxious to be part of the biggest revolution of his time, Musk had promised to invest in Hassabis' AGI startup.
Rob Kelly:That would be DeepMind. Okay. So now we're back to Elon and Larry Page of Google flying on the jet back from SpaceX. Demis is not in this conversation. It's just Elon and Larry.
Rob Kelly:There's only one AI company that I think is going to work, Musk now informed Page, and I'm an investor in that company, DeepMind. Page responded to this put down in the most respectful way possible. He took out his Android phone and typed a no to the name that must had just dropped on him. Watching this exchange, Nocek's mind started racing. I know Larry.
Rob Kelly:Larry wants to build AGI, Nocek said later, reconstructing his reaction at the time, a sensation bordering on panic. Larry had wanted to build AGI his whole life. He's gonna try to get DeepMind or copy it or something. Just an interesting side note, by the way, technically, when the author looked back, Elon Musk had not invested yet. He wouldn't invest his 5,000,000 until later on after that conversation with Larry Page.
Rob Kelly:He just couldn't help himself in bragging, being proud of his association with Demis at that point. But Nosek hated the prospect of Google acquiring DeepMind. The way he saw things, AGI was a terrifyingly powerful technology. Recently, he had taken up meditation to help process the enormity of it. Because of the awesome stakes involved, Nosek did not trust a corporate behemoth like Google to steward the technology.
Rob Kelly:He wanted AGI to remain in the hands of his friend, Hassabis, with appropriately freaked out people such as himself keeping a careful watch over it. I thought it was very, very important for DeepMind to stay independent in order to fulfill his mission, Nosek recalled later. I remember thinking, oh, man. Okay. How can I derail this conversation?
Rob Kelly:Because if I don't, Larry's gonna get DeepMind. Later that day, Nosek phoned Haspis in London to warn him of Google's interest, knowing that Haspis had visceral feelings about the power of his technology. He was expecting to be leery of a Google takeover. Look. What do we do about this?
Rob Kelly:Nosek asked desperately. He was still teetering on the edge of panic. To Nosek's consternation, Hassabis sounded unruffled. Well, this could be good, he said. Let's play this out.
Rob Kelly:Let's see what happens. And Mustafa Suleyman aka Moose at the time, played a critical role here. Quote, Peter Thiel wasn't meeting with us, wasn't doing reviews, wasn't giving us feedback, Suleyman remembers telling Hassabis. We had no connection to him. Obviously, we're irrelevant nobodies from North London.
Rob Kelly:So it's really interesting. Even though Thiel's founder fund put in money, Thiel was not personally active with them. And it was Moose who alerted Demis to this. Hassabis later agreed. So I don't actually think that Thiel ever believed in AGI, Hassabis said, belatedly describing the speculative mindset and the pattern of returns that drives all venture investing.
Rob Kelly:But I couldn't see that at the time. I was in awe of what goes on in Silicon Valley. I was still just a kid from London. Okay. So back a month after that conversation between Elon Musk and Larry Page, the outcome of Musk's name dropping landed in Hassabis' inbox.
Rob Kelly:Quote, sorry to send you an email out of the blue, the message began. My name is Alan Eustis, and I work for Larry Page at Google. Larry has had a long standing interest in AI and has asked me to build a set of teams with different but complementary charters. Eustis' email continued. Larry sent me your name this morning as one of the people he believes is doing revolutionary work in this area.
Rob Kelly:I wonder if you have time to talk. Alright. So now we're gonna cover the actual Google deal, the acquisition of DeepMind. So a key conversation took place a June weekend in 2013 at Elon Musk's birthday party put on by his wife. And this is in Tarrytown, New York, not far from where I grew up.
Rob Kelly:So interestingly, one of the other guests is Larry Page of Google. And seizing the opportunity to connect with Demis and potentially acquire DeepMind, Larry proposes a walk with Demis. I'm just gonna read an excerpt here. The two men strolled around the grounds of the castle in Tarrytown, New York where the party was taking place, taking in the pointless folly of the battlements and arrow slits. Speaking in a strained whisper, the effect of a rare illness in the vocal cords, Page suggested that Hassabis' company building endeavors might be similarly pointless.
Rob Kelly:Demis' goal was to create AGI, so why bother with the idea of an independent deep mind? Google was the obvious place to realize his ambition. Why don't you take advantage of what I've already created? Page asked Hassabis. Now Page cofounded Google with Sergey Brin, not solely, but in this case, he said, why don't you take advantage of what I've already created?
Rob Kelly:It was a recruitment pitch that he had successfully used on other startup founders. He was basically telling me maybe you could build a company like Google, but it would take the best part of your career, Hassabis recalled. But if my real mission was to build AGI, then why don't I use all the resources that he'd accumulated? I thought that was a pretty good argument. Would I be happier looking back on building a multibillion dollar business or helping solve intelligence?
Rob Kelly:Hassabis continued, remembering the decision that Page framed for him. The choice was all the easier because of what Page represented. The Google chief was not a business person or a product person. He was a scientist. You could easily see Larry as a top professor in an Ivy League, Hassabis said.
Rob Kelly:He had that intellectual capacity, that demeanor. When we went on that walk together, I felt he would have taken his own offer. The contrast with DeepMind's venture capital backers, people like Peter Thiel, was obvious. Hassabis had struggled to persuade Founders Fund that DeepMind would end up changing every widget in the world. With Paige, she didn't even have to make that argument.
Rob Kelly:I was fed up with scrambling around trying to justify what I knew was the biggest thing of all time, Hassabis recalled. I just thought, look, I'll go to Google. I'll get a shitload of computers, and then I'll solve intelligence. Demis leaned heavily on Moose for the negotiations with Google. Quote, Moose is very good at that stuff, Hassabis said later.
Rob Kelly:He generally thought of himself as a chess player. Demis thought of himself as a chess player rather than a poker player. In chess, there are no hidden cards. The game is open, and there is no scope for bluffing. Hoping to push Google to commit to a deal, they flirted with another suitor, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.
Rob Kelly:Hassabis came out to the West Coast to have lunch with Larry Page, still the strongest suitor. Zuckerberg got wind of his visit and invited him to dinner. Reading from the book here. Arriving at Zuck's Palo Alto home, Hassabis administered a subtle test on him. The two men discussed the potential of AI, and Zuckerberg expressed appropriate excitement.
Rob Kelly:But then as the dinner continued, Hassabis brought up other hot technologies, virtual reality, augmented reality, three d printing. Zuckerberg sounded equally excited about all of them. That told me what I needed to know, Hassabis said later. Facebook offered more money, but I wanted somebody who really understood why AI would be bigger than all those other things. After the dinner, Hassabis got back to Larry Page.
Rob Kelly:Let's go further, he told him. At the January 2014, Google bought DeepMind for $650,000,000. Hassabis netted a 136,000,000. Moose pocketed 34,000,000, and Shane Legg, for his part, took in 29,000,000. And I know earlier I had estimated that Legg had more stock than Moose during the founding.
Rob Kelly:They don't get into this too much in the book, but I believe that Moose over time was awarded more stock as he added his value to Google DeepMind. Just a few months later in May 2014, Hassabis flew out to the West Coast to address a gathering of Google senior execs. Hassabis got chatting with Google's other cofounder, Sergey Brin, and mentioned a possible next project. The techniques that had worked on Atari could be extended to the game of Go. A computer could defeat a world champion.
Rob Kelly:Brin seemed incredulous. He was a keen Go player, and he knew that no machine approached the mastery of the best humans. Wouldn't that be impossible? He asked skeptically. Great, Hassabis thought to himself.
Rob Kelly:If he thinks it's impossible, it should be pretty impressive if we do it. Hassabis told Brin that cracking go was absolutely doable. How long do you think it would take? Brin asked, still sounding doubtful. Larry Page's cofounder was known for insisting that the impossible was possible.
Rob Kelly:Brin was the practical partner. Two years, Hassabis responded. He hadn't given the timeline much thought, he admitted later. Brin's skepticism was well founded. Go is a game of vast combinations.
Rob Kelly:The number of possible board states during the course of a game is estimated to be at least 10 to the hundred and seventieth power, way more than the number of atoms in the observable universe. In order to master Go, a machine would have to do what humans do, look at the configuration of the pieces, the patterns that they form, and into it the correct move, whatever that meant. And remember back earlier when I mentioned how one of the key top three things that Demis demanded or tried to instill in the team is that AGI was possible? He just wanted only believers? Well, it turns out David Silver on the team, back during his PhD thesis, had done it on Go.
Rob Kelly:And so this was exactly the type of project that Demis and David Silver and the team were destined to take on. Demis also flexed his muscle of getting DeepMind's work published. They had actually prepared a paper on how to beat Go, and that got published in Nature magazine. And Google began to carry its weight. DeepMind got to use Google's new chip, the TPU.
Rob Kelly:This is the chip that supplanted NVIDIA's GPU chip. Now AlphaGo and the whole experience has been covered pretty widely, including I actually profile it in the Media and the Machine newsletter and the daily doc newsletter on documentaries. Go into a little more depth there. So I'm gonna fast forward into a few weeks before the match in South Korea. Just another little inside baseball fun stuff.
Rob Kelly:Google's chairman Eric Schmidt visited Hassabis in London. If DeepMind was staging a deep blue Kasparov type of spectacle, Schmidt wanted to be sure of victory. How's it going? He asked Hassabis. The metrics look good, but we still have some hallucinations.
Rob Kelly:Great. Just don't fuck it up, Schmidt said, only half joking. Then on 03/15/2016, DeepMind's AI AlphaGo stunned South Korean's Lee Sedol beating him four to one in front of 200,000,000 people, mostly watching in Asia. Demis and the DeepMind team had done what Sergey Brin had said was the impossible. About nine months previous to the big AlphaGo victory, something important happened regarding Elon Musk.
Rob Kelly:It brings Elon back into the picture here. So Elon remained bitter that his bid had been spurned. He didn't get to take over Google DeepMind DeepMind back then, And Google, of course, beat him, and it was really based on him sharing with Larry Page, Google cofounder, that DeepMind was an impressive company. And remember, at this point, DeepMind is gaining traction, doing interesting things, but they hadn't yet beaten AlphaGo, so they weren't nearly as famous as they would be later. But still, according to the book, Elon's sort of position was if he couldn't be the one to build AI, he wanted nobody to do so.
Rob Kelly:So in April 2015, hoping to placate their bumptious and presumptuous frenemy, I'm reading excerpt from the book, Hassabis and Page had invited Musk to join the safety board. This is a group they're getting together to try to build in safety for AI. Remember, Elon was one of the folks early on who was worried about AI safety. Elon had readily accepted, but he continued to fulminate against DeepMind, denouncing Hassabis as an evil genius. The evidence being that Hassabis had once worked on a computer game called evil genius.
Rob Kelly:By the way, it was Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman are among those who recall Elon's conviction that Hassabis's evil genius game held the clue to his true character. It was based on interviews the author did with Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. It was around this time that Musk agreed to meet with Demis and Moose, Mustafa Suleyman for lunch in Central London. And I'm gonna continue to share some insider baseball details just because I think it's fun, interesting, and also shows how well connected everyone is to each other and how far back they go. And, you know, you can describe it as incestuous.
Rob Kelly:Everyone just knows each other in this world, it seems, almost every top AI CEO cofounder. So we're back to around circa April 2015. Sometime in this period, Musk agreed to meet Hassabis and Suleiman for lunch in Central London. Moose remembers him arriving at the restaurant with his ethereal wife, Talua, in the back of a rather small Tesla with his six foot two frame. Musk's knees were practically in his mouth, and he had trouble clambering out of the vehicle.
Rob Kelly:Over lunch, Musk kept up his griping, effectively accusing DeepMind and Google of irresponsibility. And one of the reasons I wanted to paint this picture of this particular meeting in April 2015 is that Sam Altman now enters the picture. A month after that London encounter on the evening of May 25, Elon receives an email from an investor named Sam Altman. At 30, Sam already had a seat at Silicon Valley's top table. He was running Y Combinator, the startup incubator.
Rob Kelly:They're responsible for startups such as Airbnb and Dropbox. And Sam was known to always have his eye on the next big thing. A student of power, Sam had once told a friend to read Robert Caro's books on Lyndon Johnson. This friend, by the way, side note, this friend is Qi Lu. Qi was an early AI pioneer, Microsoft, Baidu, and Baidu over in China.
Rob Kelly:By the way, another interesting side note, Sam Altman goes from Y Combinator into the AI world, obviously, cofounding OpenAI, which we'll get into. And Qi Lu actually worked on AI at Microsoft and Baidu and ended up being the head of the the Chinese version of Y Combinator. But back to Sam's advice to Chi Lu to read up on Robert Caro's books on Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson's political skills were illustrated by his relationship with the senate leader Sam Rayburn. He made Rayburn feel as though he were his surrogate son because that was what Rayburn yearned for.
Rob Kelly:Altman, having read Tara, was good at making powerful people feel and hear what they wanted, as his early approach to Elon Musk demonstrated. And when I profile Sam Altman, I haven't picked the books that I'm gonna profile Sam Altman through, but we'll go deeper into all of these things and his thirst or skills at making powerful people feel loved, valued. And back to Sam's advice to Chi Lu, quote, the most successful founders do not set out to create companies, he observed. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion. And Sam was influential enough at this point to be having dinner with Elon Musk regularly on Wednesdays when Elon visited the Bay Area.
Rob Kelly:And by the way, again, the timing is impeccable here, and we have no idea if Sam knew that Elon or knew how worried Elon was about Google DeepMind. But basically, here's Sam's email. Quote, been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI, Sam wrote. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's gonna happen anyway, it seems like it'd be good for someone other than Google to do it first, the email went on, playing into Musk's obsessions.
Rob Kelly:This is really masterful that you knew how worried Elon was about DeepMind being in Google's hands, being in Larry Page's hands. Back to the excerpt from the book. Having set the table skillfully, Altman proposed the following. Any thoughts on whether it would be good for YC to start a Manhattan project for AI? He asked, referring to Y Combinator.
Rob Kelly:Altman shared a birthday with Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project's leader, and he liked to point this out to interviewers. And I'm still reading the email here from Sam to Elon. We could structure it so that the tech belongs to the world. Obviously, we'd comply with slash aggressively support all regulation. Two hours later, Elon responds, probably worth a conversation.
Rob Kelly:For the next month or so, Altman pressed his case to Musk, determined to access both his prestige and his capital. Quote, I think we'd ideally start with a group of seven to 10 people and plan to expand from there, Altman wrote and Musk to a follow-up email in on June 24. The venture would be structured as a foundation, he added. It would have a five person oversight board. Musk, Bill Gates, and none other than Altman would occupy three of the seats on it.
Rob Kelly:Quote, the technology would be owned by the foundation and used for, quote, the good of the world. And in cases where it's not obvious how that should be applied, the five of us would decide, he suggested. Elon responds with agree on all. The Sam Elon exchange would, of course, lead to the creation of OpenAI in 2015, with Elon and Sam as among the cofounders in addition to Ilya Sutskever, who at that point worked on Google's sibling AI group, Google Brain, distinct from Google DeepMind. They were two separate groups within Google at that point.
Rob Kelly:So now I wanna talk about a key kinda six or seven year period, both for DeepMind and Google and Demis. But now that OpenAI is in the equation, this is a great time period to look at to compare Demis and, say, Sam Alban. So let me give some highlights just from let's call it 2015 to 2022. So it's kind of when OpenAI got founded on up to when Chatuchiki launched, what was DeepMind doing, what was Demis doing with DeepMind and the Google team. So let's give some highlights here.
Rob Kelly:2016, we went over this. Alpha Go beats Lee Sedol. This is a year after OpenAI got founded. Landmark accomplishment in the world, kinda modern day AI. A year later, 2017, DeepMind creates AlphaGo Zero.
Rob Kelly:The first iteration of AlphaGo involved human learning and humans as part of the process. In this case, the DeepMind team built AlphaGo Zero to learn Go from scratch. No humans involved. It just can learn a game and master a game like Go from scratch. Also, 2017, in June, Google releases the transformer paper slash technology.
Rob Kelly:So the transformer was Google's invention that taught AI how to pay attention. Just think of it as a more efficient way for AI to operate. So what happens is, at this point, Google's got two AI teams. One is the DeepMind team led by Demis. The other one is called Google Brain led by Jeff Dean.
Rob Kelly:And it's Jeff Dean's team at Google Brain that creates this transformer technology and releases the paper. So we're now in 2017. OpenAI has been going for two years now. And little did the Google team, either Demis or Jeff Dean, know this, but OpenAI, Sam and team, were actively starting to build upon and make big bets upon this transformer technology that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Alright.
Rob Kelly:June 2017. Now fast forward. Next year, 2018, DeepMind releases AlphaFold. This is the major breakthrough in protein structure prediction. This is arguably the beginning of the biggest AI invention up until this point, at least.
Rob Kelly:Demis would go on to win the Nobel Prize handful of years later for it. In 2020, AlphaFold two largely solved the fifty year protein folding challenge. So you could see AlphaFold and for folks who don't know what AlphaFold is, think of it as a way to understand how proteins work in biology, and that is the best way to understand what causes cancer and other diseases and can help it's not in and of itself helping to cure cancer, but it helps doctors, healthcare pros to understand what is causing all of these, and that could, of course, lead to curing these diseases. By 2022, over at DeepMind, they've introduced systems like Gato, which shows movement toward general purpose AI agents. So basically, up until this point, most AIs were being built for a specific task like beating Go.
Rob Kelly:So AlphaGo would have been just a single function type of AI, and DeepMind came up with more of a general purpose AI that could do lots of different things. The same AI could not just beat Go, but beat humans in other games and do tasks and so forth. So by any measurement, Demis in particular and the DeepMind team and also Google, the other side, Google Brain with transformer technology had been crushing it. I mean, just major major progress in AI. All this looks monumental.
Rob Kelly:Just doing the most important work, had the most AI research papers, had the biggest army of AI folks, and I would just, you know, you would say give high marks to Demis and Jeff Dean over at Google leading their respective to AI units. That said, if you go back and look in 2018, just a year after Google released its transformer technology, OpenAI was already starting to use it for placing a bet on it and other things too, but placing a bet on the transformer technology that it would lead to major AI breakthroughs. And it's this time in the story that I feel like Demis, who loves games and super competitive, I feel like this is the first time where Demis lost in a competition in a major way. His own employer, you know, and sibling business unit, Google Brain, had this transformer technology, and basically across the street in Silicon Valley, you've got OpenAI taking this technology from Google and building up what would become ChatGPT. And it's not like OpenAI was doing this in complete secret.
Rob Kelly:So June 2018, OpenAI launches GPT one. GPT stands for pretrained transformer. So this is in 2018, June. OpenAI launches GPT one. February 2019, OpenAI launches GPT two.
Rob Kelly:June 2020, they launched GPT three. At this point, the GPT technology is only available to basically, think of it as techies with access to an API. There's no interface. There's no chat interface to it. Consumers are not using this.
Rob Kelly:These are developers, businesses playing around with it. But, oh, boy, is all this gonna change. On 11/30/2022, OpenAI launches ChatGPT, And what they did was take a chat interface and put it on GPT. By the way, anyone could have done this up until this point because the GPT technology I just love the side note. With the GPT technology was out there, and you could just grab it from OpenAI.
Rob Kelly:You had to pay for it in some form of tokens and things. But you could grab the technology, and you could have slapped an interface on it and had ChatGPT. It's OpenAI had not done it itself. It just took until 11/30/2022. They launched ChatGPT, becomes the most successful technology launch, fastest adoption ever.
Rob Kelly:And I'm reading an excerpt here from the book. When OpenAI's ChatGPT became a worldwide sensation at the end of two thousand twenty two, DeepMind paid a price for this mistake. It ceased to be perceived as the world's top AI lab. And here's Demis' reaction. Look.
Rob Kelly:You can't be Nostradamus every time, Hassabis admitted. I think what happened later with these models surprised everyone, or maybe everyone except for Ilya Setskiver and a few people around him, parentheses at OpenAI. I have a couple of thoughts about this. Basically, if you look at the timing, DeepMind for twelve years founded in September 2010 on through the end of two thousand twenty two, let's call it the launch right before the launch of ChatGPT. DeepMind basically was the most important AI team, company, group by every measurement until then, and it all changed overnight.
Rob Kelly:So my thoughts are this. One is, the reason I went through that six to seven year period of what DeepMind was doing and Demis in particular was that, you know, he won the Nobel Prize for this AlphaFold. It's arguably the most important invention in AI, even more so impact wise, probably than ChatGPT. However, Sam Altman and team at OpenAI, they created the most successful product. So big distinction there.
Rob Kelly:Demis, known for incredible papers, incredible scientific creations using AI, just not a commercial success with products. And Sam Altman did create something commercially successful, know, what looked like an overnight success after lots of iterations of this GPT. Later on, I'm gonna get into Demis versus Sam in terms of what motivates them and and the other AI CEOs too. But I think there's an important distinction of what Demis is best at and what Sam is as well. Demis would win the Nobel Prize for AlphaFold, but to most of the world, it was Sam Altman who was now the poster boy of AI.
Rob Kelly:And Sam had used Google's own tech to beat Demis to the punch, the transformer, and language learning that had been right under Demis' nose for years. It was the first time that Demis was beaten in the AI game. A few months after Chachapiti launches around April 2023, the author visited Hassabis and asked how he was feeling. This is wartime, came the answer. OpenAI and Microsoft have literally parked the tanks on the lawn.
Rob Kelly:At this point, Microsoft's already started to invest billions into OpenAI, and of course, we'll cover that in more detail when I profile Sam in a future episode. And Demis was furious. D MIND had set a virtuous example, he thought, by publishing safety papers like the Sparrow paper, explaining the model safety features so that rivals could use him. But Altman had shrugged and just charged forward with the launch of Catchy PT. What sort of person could make such a decision?
Rob Kelly:Hassabis wondered. In his early pronouncements, Altman had posed as the visionary who would make AI safe for the world. By releasing ChatGPT and then stoking the frenzy with his global tour, he was revealing other motives. Hassabis recalled Paul Graham, one of Altman's closest professional mentors, and this is from an interview Paul Graham gave with New Yorker magazine. Quote, Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful, Graham observed.
Rob Kelly:You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years, and he'd be the king. I think there's a question for anyone trying to build AGI, Hassabis said. What are your reasons for building it? My reasons are scientific. Some are definitely building it for other purposes, end quote.
Rob Kelly:But Google still believed in Demis. Shortly after, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, gave complete responsibilities for all of Google's AI. This does include, of course, DeepMind, which Demis already ran, but also Google Brain, which previously had been run by the legendary Jeff Dean. Demis was now in charge of all of Google AI. The author Malaby dug in with Demis on how Sam beat him to the punch.
Rob Kelly:I thought I'd share an excerpt here that says a lot about Demis, I think. Here's the author speaking. I asked Hassabis if he should have pivoted to product sooner. I don't know if I was ready to pivot earlier because I was in my science phase doing AlphaFold, Hassabis said. The number one thing I wanted to show was that AI could create incredible scientific breakthroughs.
Rob Kelly:It was important for the world to understand that. But now I've really scratched that itch. AlphaFold is so massive, I'm not sure I can top it, short of solving physics and the nature of reality, which is my long term goal. So I've satiated that scientific desire for the moment, and that makes the pivot easier. I feel like, okay, it'd be pretty cool to make a universal AI assistant that helps you in your daily life, like Jarvis, the AI assistant in Iron Man, or pick your favorite science fiction movie.
Rob Kelly:The author recalled that Altman had talked in similar terms saying he wanted Chachi Beatty to be like Samantha, the AI companion voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the movie Her, apparently one of Sam's favorite movies. Samantha falls in love with a human, questions her own existence, and becomes self aware. At least the utilitarian Jarvis made fewer claims to personhood. I think AI assistants are where smartphones were before the iPhone, Hassabis continued. Before the iPhone, there was the BlackBerry, the Palm Trio, whatever.
Rob Kelly:Then Steve Jobs said, hey, this is what a smartphone is supposed to look like. I still get shivers down my back watching that product launch. So actually, I've always been fine either way. If you want me to make incredible products, I can. If you want me to do prize winning science, I can.
Rob Kelly:I just need some clarity about what the goal is, and I'm very happy with where we've ended up. It's been a winding journey to get here, but now we're at the heart of Google. And I don't think before ChatGPT that Google was ready for a pivot either because it wasn't yet on a war footing. And I gotta say, this is only a few months after ChatGPT launched, so Google is just getting crushed. And it sounds like Demis is game on.
Rob Kelly:He just likes the wartime aspect, and he now has responsibility for all of Google AI. So So he's now the underdog, and he seems not to mind it at all. And the short aside, Mustafa Moose Suleyman left for his own startup around this time, later acquired by Microsoft where he became CEO of AI. And sure enough, OpenAI would give Google an opening. In November 2023, Sam Altman's fired from OpenAI.
Rob Kelly:Crazy seventy two hour period. He quickly returns, but this gives Google a big opportunity. By December 2023, Demis and team had shipped gemini1.o, and the Google DeepMind team as it was now called had grown to 5,000, easily dwarfing OpenAI. The next year or so was a true back and forth battle. Just as Gemini looked like it had caught up to ChatGPT in September 2024, OpenAI launched o one, and it beat Google in reasoning and search areas Demis should own.
Rob Kelly:On 08/02/2024, Google acquihired Character AI. They spent $2,700,000,000 to bring back Noam Shazir, the co author of Transformers. By December 2024, Google launched Gemini Flash Thinking Experimental. This had longer context, images. It was enough that by in January 2024, Sundar Pichai felt comfortable telling the Google team and Sundar's Demis' boss, telling the team that it had caught up and even was beating Chatuchipiti on multiple measures.
Rob Kelly:Basically, less than two years after the messy shotgun marriage that created Google DeepMind, Hassabis' team had closed the technical gap. And by the spring of two thousand twenty five, and I'm reading an excerpt here, Google DeepMind was advancing on offense as well as surviving on defense. Its next clutch of language models styled Gemini 2.5 narrowly outperformed OpenAI on most technical benchmarks. Into the summer and autumn, Hassabis' team maintained its lead. OpenAI rolled out a new foundation model, GPT five, but in blind head to head comparisons, it often lagged Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Rob Kelly:November 2025, Google DeepMind released Gemini three, which set new standards in coding, reasoning, and multi step planning, outperforming ChatGPT on a wide array of benchmarks. As I was reading the Infinity Machine, I kept running across ideas for comparing Demis to the other AI CEOs, other AI bosses, and I thought I would just have one section where I shared some of this. It's from different parts of the book. Some of it's my own sort of take or observations on it, and I'm just gonna dive right in here. So first off, I think there's the paradox of Demis that he is insanely competitive just like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and you know, any of the top AI CEOs, I would say.
Rob Kelly:He's as cocky as Geoffrey Hinton remembered saying. He's as cocky as him. The only person he ever met who was more competitive than him, than Geoffrey Hinton. So this is a super insanely competitive guy. But at the same time, you hear all these stories of how affable he is, putting people at ease and just kind and nice and Demis himself says he got it from his mom.
Rob Kelly:And we know his mom grew up orphaned and in poverty and and worked as a nurse, you know, sort of very much a do gooder in life. And part of my job here is to be a guide here about the AI CEOs. These are leaders who are having a massive impact on business, politics, our future, humanity, and any of the nuances of differences, I think, are worth exploring and and important. And so on the affable side, people calling Demis affable and kind, you don't hear that said about, for instance, Sam Altman or Elon Musk. And I've chatted with Sam once.
Rob Kelly:I've never met Elon, but affable doesn't come up with those folks and many other AI leaders. So I think that's important. They've got their other strengths. The other important thing to note here is how the different major AI frontier models got founded and what the purpose of the founding was. I do think this is important.
Rob Kelly:It ties to the AI leaders. So let's go in order here. Demis started DeepMind to create AGI. He said that all along. It's well documented.
Rob Kelly:That's been his mission, his purpose. OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Setskiver, and others. OpenAI was founded in large part to make sure there was an alternative to DeepMind and Google after Google acquired DeepMind. So very different purpose of how they were founded. Doesn't mean that has to remain the main mission or goal, but I do think it tells you about the founding team.
Rob Kelly:Anthropic for its part was founded by Dario and his sister Daniella and five others from OpenAI to make a safer AGI than what Sam Altman and crew were building. And we'll get more into that as we profile both Sam and at least Ario, and maybe need to profile Daniella as well and some of the other five cofounders. If I had to describe each of the top three AI companies, and this is my observation, this is not in the book, but my observation, what I thought of while I was reading the Infinity Machine. If I had to describe each of the companies and their key CEO, for Demis and DeepMind, it would be to create AGI. It'd be AGI, the mission, the scientific, the science of building AGI.
Rob Kelly:If I had to describe OpenAI in one word, it would be power. Again, it was created as an alternative to make sure that the power did not get into the hands of DeepMind and Google. I mean, this is documented by emails and and texts. So just an interesting note. It doesn't mean it didn't change since then, but if I had to pick one word, it'd be power.
Rob Kelly:And then for Anthropic, which is founded by Dario and his sister Daniella and five others who are at OpenAI and decided to leave Sam at that point and the OpenAI team, if I had to sum up in one word for them, at least of their founding, it would be safety. Because after all, it was the safety team for the most part that left OpenAI and informed Anthropic. So just my take on the founding of those three companies and what it might tell about the motives and missions and purpose of the leaders at these top AI companies. I had one opinion on Demis from the book that didn't quite fit anywhere else. So I'm just gonna share it here, and that's back to when Peter Thiel was sizing them up.
Rob Kelly:Peter Thiel and Founders Fund invested in DeepMind. Now they've had a nice payoff when it was sold to Google, but at the same time, Peter Thiel and team would much rather have an independent company like a DeepMind because it could be a 100 times as valuable as what Google spent for it. But he still had a nice win. Anyway, remember Thiel shared that he felt instinctively suspicious of a fellow chess player being Demis, a man who had spent his formative years mentally crushing opponents. He should be treated with caution, Thiel reckoned.
Rob Kelly:This is all a direct interview with Peter Thiel. And besides, Hassabis excelled at other board games such as diplomacy. Thiel thought that diplomacy was essentially a test of how well you can manipulate people. There was also one other part of the book where the author is interviewing Demis on some things related to other AI leaders and power in this topic. And again, I wanna read this excerpt.
Rob Kelly:Basically, they're talking about AI, its inventors, and motivations. Quote from Demis. I was on the stage at the Nobel ceremony, and I was thinking I wouldn't have swapped this for any amount of money. If you offered me 10,000,000,000 for the Nobel, I would say no, and you can't buy the Nobel for 10,000,000,000. That's the thing I like about it.
Rob Kelly:The author suggested that Sam Altman didn't care about money either. He already had enough of it. Very interesting side note, by the way, is Sam Altman does not own any equity directly in OpenAI. I'll cover this when I do a profile of Sam, but there's lots of theories on it. But he owns indirectly something through Y Combinator, but literally his cofounder Greg Brockman has 30,000,000,000 worth of AI stock at current.
Rob Kelly:It might be higher by now. Sam, at least officially, has zero. So back to Demis. I'm doing it for knowledge and science. It seems like he, Sam, is doing it for power, Hassabis responded.
Rob Kelly:And another quote from Demis. And, of course, if I really cared about power for its own sake, why would I have sold the company? I'm not actually in control of it anymore. I mean, I can be fired. This is all true.
Rob Kelly:Sundar Pichai CEO is his boss, and then Larry Page and Sergey Brin are really the ultimate bosses at Google owning such a large amount of stock and voting power. From Demis, quote, if you run your own company like Sam, Elon, Mark Zuckerberg, or Larry, then you really can't be fired. That's one of the reasons that people start companies. But I only started DeepMind because I thought it was the best way to get the mission off the ground. AGI is the mission.
Rob Kelly:If I'd stayed in academia, I wouldn't have had the resources. And anyway, AGI should be gifted to the world eventually. I mean, AGI is infinitely bigger than a company or a person or a set of owners. It's bigger than capitalism and national economies. It's humanity sized really.
Rob Kelly:It's humanity's invention, and it's gonna affect all humanity. So humanity should run it. Unfortunately, the problem is, what are the right institutions? Until we figure that out, I do need power, at least a bit of it. It's like with money.
Rob Kelly:I don't care about money at all, but I need some of it. And Malby continues to dive into this whole topic, does a great job with Demis more on power and money and motivations. Malby asked Demis, does he have any expensive tastes? Supercars or something? I got that out of my system, Hassabis said.
Rob Kelly:He used to he he got a borrowed a Porsche from his old boss, Peter Molyneux. It was fun for a couple years, but then I thought, okay, that's it. Now my family is a ten year old Audi. After DeepMind's sale to Google, Hassabis had bought a large family home to which he soon added a cool modern extension. But as his fortune climbed into the hundreds of millions, had he traded up again?
Rob Kelly:Quote, I've been in the same house for more than ten years. What is the view from your home office? He's asked. There isn't one. It's an attic.
Rob Kelly:Do you own other homes? Yes. But they're for family members. Holiday homes? No.
Rob Kelly:Ski chalet? No. Beach house? Nothing. A yacht?
Rob Kelly:Of course not. Scientific collectibles? I've got some first editions of Shannon's papers. They cost £5,000 or so. Malibu asked the author Malibu asked, you must have something that you spent more on.
Rob Kelly:My Nobel medal is my most valuable position. What about hobbies? Those could be expensive. Watching football, soccer. After I sold the company, I bought season tickets for Liverpool.
Rob Kelly:It's £3,000 a year, and I try to go see a game a few times a season. That's my main fun activity. What about philanthropy? Yes. From my mom's church.
Rob Kelly:And I've also given millions to fund scholarships for underprivileged children who get into Cambridge. And I know I'm going deep here, but first off, again, there's just a handful of AI leaders who are affecting our future here at this current moment. And even any inkling into Demis' thinking, what he'll do with Google DeepMind, and what else he might do if he were not at Google DeepMind is I think very important. So I'm gonna read another excerpt here related to that topic. Back to Demis.
Rob Kelly:Quote, what I do regard as important is I wanna build a large Hadron Collider in space. Life's very short, and there's not a lot of time to waste if you wanna do that sort of project. The Large Hadrian Collider is a particle accelerator created by CERN buried in a 17 mile circular tunnel that straddles the border between France and Switzerland. By smashing subatomic particles together, the collider simulates some of the conditions that followed a fraction of a second after the big bang. The author asked why Hassabis wanted a space version of CERN's contraption.
Rob Kelly:Quote from Demis, I wanna understand the nature of reality at the most fundamental level. But why do that in space? He's asked. Hassabis said he was imagining enormous moon sized experimental equipment, a sort of large Hadrian collider plus plus. Quote from Demis, you are an Alpha Centauri, he explained, referring to the nearest solar system to Earth's, and you are using the gravity of a moon and you're building some massive ring around it that's powered by the local sun.
Rob Kelly:The author asked what Hassabis would wanna discover with this space apparatus. Quote, well, you'd wanna find out what's going on at the tiniest scale, the Planck scale. We could discover whether there's any scale that is smaller. We can answer questions like, is the universe continuous? Is it discrete?
Rob Kelly:What is it really? As I was reading the Infinity Machine, some pop culture things were coming up about Demis, favorite books, movies, and things. I I think sometimes that tells you a lot about someone, so I wanted to at least share some of the things. Even though they're all across the book, they're not in one part of the book. And Demis had one book and two movies that he really likes a lot.
Rob Kelly:They're mentioned a lot in the book. The book is called Ender's Game, and the movies are Blade Runner and Matrix. And they share one idea if you look across the three of them. Intelligence is tested inside strange systems. Ender's Game especially makes sense.
Rob Kelly:It's an underdog story about a child prodigy trained through games for a war in space. That maps really closely to Demis, a chess prodigy from London outside Silicon Valley trying to build AGI before most people took it seriously. Then you got Blade Runner and why it's up his alley. It asks what truly makes someone human, biology, memories, emotions, or consciousness. And then finally, The Matrix asks whether reality itself is a simulation.
Rob Kelly:Of the cool things that the author Malaby did is probe Demis on what a post AGI world looks like. I wish I had found this for Mustafa Suleyman the first profile I did, head of Microsoft AI. Maybe we'll get to that another time. Do some sort of part two on that. But in this case, Demis shared exactly what he sees a post AGI world look like.
Rob Kelly:So I'm gonna read an excerpt here. People aren't thinking ambitiously enough about what a post AGI world will look like, Hassabis said. I still hear people talking about the limits to our resources, like will we have enough to pay for government programs or to deal with the fallout from AI, such as a universal basic income, or for the electricity to power the data centers. But it's gonna be like Ian Banks' culture series. We're gonna be mining asteroids.
Rob Kelly:We're gonna solve nuclear fusion. We will have ways of extracting hydrogen fuel from seawater. People are not understanding the magnitude of the change. I just wanna pause here. Remember, Demis is a scientist, so I I don't think he throws these things around carelessly when he's making some of the predictions of what AGI is going to create.
Rob Kelly:And remember also because he's set money wise, he doesn't really need to sell more product to make more money for himself. Back to Demis, quote, I don't think money is even gonna be relevant. What will money mean in a post scarcity society? Maybe that's why he doesn't care that much about money as much as others. Or corporations or the stock market.
Rob Kelly:What do these things mean if we have super abundance, he calls it? And I'm not sure that the solution to social needs will be universal basic income by the way. There's this other thing called universal basic provision where it's not money you're giving people. Instead, you're providing all that's needed for today's millionaire lifestyle. A nice house, schooling, health care, basic travel, all that cost you nothing as a citizen.
Rob Kelly:Demis continues, and then look, maybe you get a normal car for free. But if you want a Ferrari, okay, well then you need to do some extra work to earn some extra income. But everyone has this amazing basic access to material goods. That's my view of what the world will look like in the long run. Pretty powerful stuff.
Rob Kelly:And, of course, it's important to get Demis' recommendation on how to do all this, AGI, safely. Reading an excerpt here, Hassabis took the opportunity in Davos to restate his familiar safety vision. He reiterated his call for an international body to coordinate the last steps to AGI, an institution modeled on CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He mentioned his idea for an AI counterpart to the International Atomic Energy Agency with the responsibility to watch over national AI programs. Demis continued, quote, there are many different ways of building AGI, some of which will be safe and very positive for humanity, and some of which will be very negative and very dangerous.
Rob Kelly:And we don't necessarily know which is which at the moment. I'm optimistic we'll get this right, Hassabis went on, given enough time and the scientific method and enough of our smartest people working on it. But then he added a rider. The world could have AI safety if it embraced some version of his plan, but the plan required everyone to sign on. Responsible players doing the right thing couldn't protect society if irresponsible ones refused to collaborate.
Rob Kelly:Quote, if other groups or other countries or other companies don't do that, then it doesn't matter. If even only one or two of these projects design harmful AGIs, then it could be seriously existential for humanity. And I should note that Dario, co founder of Anthropic, has similar views and I'll of course profile Dario another time. Just some closing thoughts. I couldn't help while I was reading the Infinity Machine.
Rob Kelly:I couldn't help but just think about where Demis is gonna end up. He's gonna do in the future. So a couple things. One is he's got the Larry Page problem. Larry Page being the CEO of Alphabet, owner of Google, and also controlling a lot of stock and voting rights in Google.
Rob Kelly:So when Demis sold DeepMind to Google, we didn't talk about this. There was a condition that its technology would be protected from military and surveillance abuse. And, you know, around a decade or so later, Google had removed this explicit ban on those uses, a sign of just how far the AI race sort of has moved from its original idealism. I think that could cause a serious showdown between Demis and Larry at some point. So I want to get that out there.
Rob Kelly:Also on Demis' future, I could easily see him moving on to running a CERN like organization that he recommends. It would, of course, be with a group and a committee, but I could see him being sort of the chair of something like that. He's gotta end up doing something in space. I mean, he just talks enough about it, cares enough about it. It could still be within Google, but I see space as being a key part of his future.
Rob Kelly:And again, I'm always trying to as I dig into profiling a person like Demis, just to understand what's unique about them, where they're one of one. And one thing that's unique about Demis compared to other AI leaders is I have not seen him invoke a single entrepreneur. Mention of anyone like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or even Elon Musk. There does not seem to be a capitalist hero in his mind. He instead invokes scientists, Einstein, Isaac Newton, Richard Feynman.
Rob Kelly:And that is interesting. Think back to he's a scientist at heart. I think that's important to know about Demis and what he'll do in the future. If I was a betting man, I'd bet more on Demis working on something new that results in a second scientific breakthrough, kinda like AlphaFold, perhaps even winning a second Nobel Prize. I'd bet on that happening way more than him becoming a trillionaire or CEO of the largest company in the world.
Rob Kelly:Those things just don't motivate him. It's my way of sort of saying, I'm almost predicting. He's the most likely of the AI CEOs and leaders who I think might move on to something else because he's not motivated by power and money in the way that some other AI CEOs seem to be. Thanks again to Sebastian Mallaby for writing such a comprehensive book. The Infinity Machine is a compelling read.
Rob Kelly:I highly recommend it for anyone interested in AI in our future. I, of course, left out tons. I think if you're at all interested in this topic, you should dig in and and buy the book. Borrow the book in the library. Do whatever you do to consume the book.
Rob Kelly:And finally, I'm not sure who I'm gonna profile next, but I've got a bunch of books I read already, and it will be one of the top AI CEOs, and I really look forward to it. Thanks. Well, this is Media and the Machine. A few things about you and me. If you wanna hear about the next new episode, make sure you hit follow on the show in your podcast app.
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