#416 The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis

David Senra· Host0:00

He was caught up in a terrifying capitalistic contest, and he relished it. "This is the most crazy, ferocious corporate battle that we've ever seen," he said. "I can't imagine it being any more intense, but I'm doing it my way. I'm a weird British outlier on this little island here, and I've made my own path. I followed my passions and tried to stay true to what I believe in, and I'm gonna carry on doing that. This is my mission, so I will do it 100%. It is literally just the first level of what's coming. This is a paradoxical moment, which I guess is sort of messing with my mind. It should feel amazing realizing all these dreams that we've had for more than 15 years, but it doesn't feel like how I imagined it would feel. The way it's going is this mad rush. I've had to make my peace with that, recognize that it's going to be messy, and I'll just have to do my best, and maybe we, being the world, will muddle through somehow. I'm optimistic still." That excerpt is from the end of the book that I'm gonna talk about today, which is "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence," and it was written by Sebastian Mallaby. The publisher was nice to send me an advance copy, and by the time you hear this episode, this book will be available to buy. And I think that ending of the book is the perfect place to begin this episode. And so I wanna jump right into the introduction. There's a bunch of highlights I have from the introduction and from the first chapter I think will give you a good overview of what I wanna talk to you about today. So it says, "This book is about intelligence. On the one hand, it's a portrait of a remarkable human, a chess prodigy, a Nobel laureate, a polymathic thinker. On the other hand,