Founders - #416 The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

This episode is about a once-in-a-generation mind working on what may be the most important problem in history. Based on the new book The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby. Made possible by: Ramp: https://ramp.com Axon by AppLovin: https://axon.ai/founders Vanta: https://vanta.com/founders

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've followed my passions and tried to stay true to what I believe in, and I'm going to 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 I'm going to talk about today, which is the Infinity Machine, Demas Sassabas, Deep Mine, and the quest for superintelligence,

and it was written by Sebastian Malaby. 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 want to jump right into the introduction. There's a bunch of highlights I have from the introduction and for the first chapter, I think will give you a good overview of what I want to 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, it tells the stories of its quest to build remarkable machines, systems that are intuitive, creative, and even original. And so even though Demis is in the greatest competition of his life, one that he is built for, one that he is relishing, he gave the author an unbelievable amount of his time, and this is why. Believing that societies will never trust inventors of transformational technologies

unless they understand what makes them tick, Demas agreed to the deep access I needed. And so then the author, Sebastian, talks about some of the personality traits that Demas has. It says Demas came across as phenomenally articulate. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with Demas. And that is exactly how I would describe him. He is phenomenally articulate. And one of the things that is obvious if you read the book and one of the things that jumped out when you study him is he is a missionary.

It's one of the things I most admire about him. He has been talking about this mission for a decade and a half before it has basically consumed our entire world. And so the introduction pulls out some of these ideas that he's been repeating for a very long time. Intelligence is fundamental. It is the root of all else. It is the mechanism through which humans perceive reality. It's the mind that creates our reality around us, Demis said. Richard Feynman said, what I cannot build, I do not understand.

Following Feynum's dictum, in order to grasp human intelligence, scientists would have to build an artificial analog, a machine that mimicked human thinking. This next sentence is very important. AI's practical or profit-making potential was a. a secondary concern. Damis was delivering this sort of talk repeatedly at tech gatherings in the 2010s. The boyish philosopher on stage was clearly not a stereotypical entrepreneur peddling a hot app that promised untold riches. And then if you think about that excerpt that appears at the end of the book, that he's like, you know, I'm this weird British outlier and I'm just trying to follow my own path and following

my passions and staying true to what I believe in. Founding a company to build AGI back in 2010 was viewed by others as ridiculous, as laughable. When they found a deep mind in 2010, fellow scientists had rolled their eyes, believing the construction of human-like AI to be impossible. Almost every potential investor had turned them away. But Demis had nonetheless scrapped together funding and persuaded gifted researchers to join him all on the strength of his exhilarating vision. And so his vision of the future is to use AI to solve every single scientific problem that plagues humanity. It is a very optimistic vision. That's why I wanted to include that excerpt at the very beginning of this episode. The optimistic vision of AI discovery has history

in its corner. Past innovations from gunpowder to nuclear fission have made wars more terrifying and accidents more lethal. But the general effect on technological change has been to amplify our experiences and extend our lifespans. And the very act of creating new technologies is intrinsic to being human. And so give some of the examples of the accomplishments that DeepMind had in earlier in their history. In 2016, DeepMind solved a grand challenge in computer science creating a system that surpassed the intuitive brilliance of the world's best players of the ancient board game Go. There's a great documentary that you can watch on YouTube. It is about Demis and DeepMind and some of their accomplishments. It's called the thinking game. So back to this. In

2020, DeepMind solved a second grand challenge in biochemistry, stitching together 32 algorithms to divine the shape of nearly all the proteins in nature. This was the breakthrough for which Demis shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry. So in 2024, Demis and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for protein structure prediction. Still in the introduction, the author gives an overview of some of the unique characteristics that Demas has. He stands for a type. The missionary entrepreneur and the out-of-the-box scientist who, through brilliance and

extraordinary drive, emerges as the right person for a particular moment. But at a deeper level, Demas provides a window on life's external enigmas. What drives people to act? What is their purpose? He has been thinking about thinking since he was a little kid, which we'll get into. And so as the author Sebastian spends more and more time with him, he understands. the power of stories on the effect of not only how Demas views the world, but also Demis is a phenomenal storyteller.

I experienced this firsthand. Demas revealed himself as an extraordinary consumer and teller of stories. His outlook is shaped by novels and movies, and his gifts as a leader are bound up with his genius for narrating his experiences. When he is in full flow, ideas pour out of him in a torrent. And this is an example, and I think this is one of the best excerpts in the book. I am first and foremost a scientist, Demis began. My goal is to understand nature, but doing science is sort of like reading the mind of God.

We humans have these faculties. The world is understandable, but why should it be that way? I think there's a reason. Computers are just bits of sand and copper. 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? Why should that be possible?

This is beyond evolutionary coincidence. We can build electron microscopes and interrogate reality down to the most minute level. We can build systems that detect black holes colliding for more than a billion years ago. I mean, what is this? What the hell is going on here? I sit at my desk at 2 a.m. And I feel like reality is staring at me, screaming at me, literally screaming at me, trying to tell me something if I could just listen hard enough.

That's how I feel every day. So you can see why I'm trying to build AI. I felt that since I was very young, that there's a deep, deep mystery about what's going on here. You can frame it however you want. You can call this God's design, or you can say it's just nature. I'm open-minded about the description, and I don't know what the answers will turn out to be. At the moment, we don't really know what time is or gravity is or any of these things. So there's a mystery waiting to be solved, and it encompasses just about everything.

I would like to understand, and then I'm perfectly fine to shuffle off my mortal coil. That's just incredible. And so then the author goes, again, just into what kind of person is. who blazed the trail followed by his rivals is decent and public-spirited and wants the best for humanity. He has ego. He is ferociously competitive, but his goal is scientific enlightenment,

not money or power. The spiritual language in which he sometimes couches his mission underscores how seriously he takes it. So I would say definitely after I got to spend time with him, but especially after reading this book, he's the kind of passionate missionary that you just root for, that you want to see when.

And so one of the reoccurring themes wrote this book is just his comfort in following his own path, making his own decisions. It says Demas himself is a figure apart. It is not by coincidence that he has chosen to remain in London far from Silicon Valley's hype and commotion. And so he is telling the author how important stories are to him. In fact, he said you should read one of his favorite novels, which is Ender's game to understand him. And there's a great overview of Demis's accomplishments before he found this book. Partway through his doctoral research in neuroscience when he had already been a chess master, a video game designer, an amateur theoretical physicist, an entrepreneur, a computer scientist,

and a five-time world champion, Demas discovered a work of science fiction that made sense of who he really was. The book was called Ender's Game, and it tells the story of a diminutive boy genius who is taken from his family and sent off to a space station. There, at an intergalactic battle school, Ender is manipulated by adults, bullied by classmates, and put through extreme mental testing, all to discover whether he could shoulder responsibility for the survival of the human race. By dint of grit and talent, Ender rises to the challenge. Demis identified powerfully with Ender, and he suggested that I read Ender's game in advance of our first long conversation. If I was to get to know him, I would have to understand his science fiction alter ego,

to see the capacity for endurance, the ability to suffer and still soldier on. Like Ender, Demas has dedicated every fiber of his being to the accomplishment of a mission, which is why he worked night shifts from 10 in the evening until 4 in the morning in addition to his normal office hours. Like Ender, Demis felt a burden of responsibility. If you were trying to solve humanity's problems and understand the nature of reality, you don't have time to waste, he said. And so I saw a few other people that had advanced copies of this book and one of them was reading it and posting about it on X. And when I found this next excerpt, I think this description of this next excerpt was phenomenal. It says it's just wild how some people are playing a completely different game, 24-7 no off switch.

And so there's this excerpt from one of Demis's co-founders of Deep Mind, Shane Legg, describing how unusual a figure that Demis is. He says Demis has extraordinary level of determination, unlike pretty much anybody. Astonishing, incredible determination. That is his most defining characteristic. Just unbelievable determination. He works, sleeps, eats, breathes the mission 24 hours a day to a degree. that I haven't seen with other people. And he's asked to follow up.

No hobbies? Football, he's a big fan of Liverpool, but other than that, it's the mission. Another follow-up question. That was evident even when you met him more than a decade ago? Always. Demas tells a story about his father saying,

whether you win or lose, the really important thing is that you try your best. Demis says that he took that very literally, as in absolutely try the absolute, absolute, absolute best you can possibly do. Pretty much to the point of breaking yourself. That's how he is, I don't think his father meant his comment in quite the literal sense. Try your best wasn't supposed to mean try literally to the point of destroying yourself.

Go absolutely completely 100%. But that's how Demas understood it. There is no 50% mode in Demis. There's not even a 99% mode in Demis. There is only 100%. And before we jump back into this incredible story, let me tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. The best businesses in the world are constantly attacking and questioning their costs. And Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that.

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His father had been the first from his family to attend university. His dad was an aspiring singer-songwriter and sold toys out of the family's beaten-up Volkswagen van. Luckily for Demas, he discovers chess when he's four. He has a natural aptitude for the game. He first sees his father play a game against his uncle. That causes him to want to learn how to play. play. Within a few weeks, he had mastered the game well enough to defeat adults. Keep in mind, he was four. By the time he's five years old, he begins competing in tournaments, sitting on a telephone

book on top of a chair so that he could get his head over the table. He was relentlessly competitive. That is something that's going to be repeated over and over again. I think I heard him say one time that half his brain is dedicated to competition. He is ferociously, ferociously competitive. And so when he is six years old, a renowned chess player and a television commentator goes up to Demis's dad and says, hey, your son is the best six-year-old chess player I have ever seen. And Demma says, what are you going to do when someone tells you that? My parents were fairly normal people living normal lives, and a renowned expert is telling you this.

His father responded to the message as though instructions had been handed down from God. And for the next half a dozen years, weekend after weekend, he bundled his young son into the family's van and drove him off to tournaments. The father-son duo spent nights in sleeping bags laid out in the back of the van, and other times they found a cheap hostel and shared a bunk bed. Remember, his parents didn't have a lot of money. I imagine my parents had a lot of arguments about money because we didn't have much, Demis said. Chess consumed every weekend and every day of school vacation, squeezing out the easy recreation of a normal childhood.

Demas could barely imagine what just living might mean. He had never tried it out. And so Demas also found himself in a very volatile environment. Later on, you'll understand that he hates to relinquish control. And you see this a lot with people that had childhoods like this. When Demas had a bad game, his father would erupt. There was one time I lost horribly. My dad went mental.

He was screaming. How could you have done this? How could you have done this? It was just awful. We were in some hostel and he was going on about this, screaming. And this used to be a regular occurrence with my dad. And I finally said to him, this is ridiculous. I obviously tried my best.

I'm not intentionally losing. And then that was that. I wasn't going to take it anymore. That was the last time I remember him screaming at me. And so then Demis comments on what his co-founder was talking about, the fact that his dad would say, hey, you need to always do your best. and so he describes how he interpreted this, and keep in mind he is nine or ten years old

when he's thinking like this. The slightly warped way I took this was, how do you know if you've done your best? The only way I could know is if I basically push myself to the point just before death, because that is literally when you've done your best. If you die, and by die, I mean burnout or something, then you've slightly overdone it.

It's like running a marathon. 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 and you're still standing, maybe you could have tried harder. And so at this point of life, you just assumed, okay, I'm going to be a professional chess player. But then he goes to this tournament and he realizes, wait a minute, I need to dedicate, this is a colossal waste of brain power. Maybe I should dedicate my life and energy to something more meaningful and world-changing than playing a board game for the rest of my life.

So he says, the experience an epiphany. That tournament had been packed with brilliant brains dueling over a board game until stamina was drained to nothing. Surely that immense collective mental effort should have been harnessed to some higher cause, say science or medicine. I thought we were wasting our minds. And so right there and then he resolved that there must be something more. There must be a mission, a purpose. And so something you'll see throughout his life is that all these experiences that he has, all the things that he's learning, they fit together almost like a puzzle. So he discovers this book that's called the chess computer handbook is written by this guy named David Levy.

And it says Levy introduced Demis to the themes that would animate his lifelong quest to build artificial intelligence, the marriage of computing and chess united Demas's two worlds. He read the book in one sitting. 12-year-old Demis sets out applying Levy's principles. He built a computer program to play a simpler game, the game Othello. The program proved intelligent enough to beat Demis's little brother. This is what Demis said about it. It was amazing that I made something that could beat him. And so Demis gets introduced to AI through gaming. He's reading all these gaming magazines. At this point, he's 16 years old. He gets. into Cambridge, but they're saying he's too young to attend, so he's like this one-year

gap. And so he's going to work out the best gaming studio in Europe. It's called Bullfrog. And the way he gets there is he read these gaming magazines that had an ad. We're saying, if you win this competition to create this game, the prize was a job at Bullfrog. And so this is a description of the environment there and some of his coworkers. Demas was fascinated by the other Bullfrog employees, technically talented self-made young men, many of whom had dropped out of high school, being too idiosyncratically gifted or plain wild to sit me in a classroom, the line between working and philosophizing blurred. We were brainstorming these big ideas.

There was this thrill of unbridled creation. And so the founder of Bullfrog is a guy named Peter Mulanoo, and he gives Demis a life-changing book. The book is called Goldol, Escher, and Bach. And then the way the book is described in this book, it says it was a fire hose of a book that inspired a remarkable number of future AI scientists. As a chess prodigy, Demas had long been curious about the workings of his own mind. How did his brain formulate moves?

Why did it make mistakes? And what was behind this phenomenon called thinking? The author of the book attacked these questions as a physicist, insisting that human intelligence and computer intelligence are virtually indistinguishable. And so he's around 16 years old at the time. He was living away from his parents surrounded by rebels who love to dream about AI under the watch of a mentor who encouraged these passions. We were discussing AI all the time, Demis recalled.

How could it help the games? What would it take to build it? At the same time, Demas was inhaling science fiction. He was reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Ian Banks' culture series. And this is how all these experiences came together. Demis' experience at Bullfrog answered his big question. His mission and purpose would be to build artificial intelligence. Molinu and the book that he gave him had planted the idea that computers would soon do whatever the brain could do.

Ian Banks gave him this applied utopian vision of what AI's realization could mean, boundless human flourishing. I decided then that I was going to dedicate my career to working on AI, Demis recalled. I had already had the colonel of the idea for what eventually became deep mine. And so this will give you an indication of just how special Demas was. He quits Bullfrog because he wants to attend Cambridge. The founder did everything possible to persuade him not to go. He writes out a check for 500,000 pounds to get him to work on Bullfrog's next game.

Keep in mind this is a poor 17 or 18 year old at the time. He does not have money. That amount of money would be $1.7 million in today's money. And Demis refuses. And so while at college, he's thinking about what he wants to do for his life. At some time, he gets really interested in theoretical physics. But then again, this is so important to understanding just how competitive he is. He realizes he can't go into a career in theoretical physics.

It says when he signed up for a game, he liked to feel that he could win. And physics seemed like a long shot. And one of the most fascinating things about Demis is that he's insanely competitive, but unbelievably kind and nice and approachable. And so the author is struck by this and he asked him about this. He goes, one day I asked Demas about his friendly approachability. Demas says, I've always tried to live like that. It is a very deep personal philosophy.

I think it's just my personality. I want to help people. And I feel very strongly that it's really bad to manipulate or control people. And so at this point, Demis is building his worldview. And one of the most important things is something he repeats throughout this book is that he believes that information is the fundamental unit of the universe. And so he has what's described as a two-part epiphany, something that sticks with him throughout his entire career. Number one, information was the fundamental unit of reality.

Number two, a machine that learned for itself how to induce nature's patterns was the most powerful imaginable tool with which to apprehend reality. While artificial intelligence could push the frontiers of science, it could also do much else besides that. It could discover medicines, extend the lifespan of humans, solve the obstacles to nuclear fusion, rendering energy clean and abundant. As Demis once put it, what we are working on is potentially a meta-solution to any problem. A machine that can navigate an infinity of data would be infinite in its reach. Let's go back to this idea

that his ability to think for himself to forge his own path. You see it when he was a kid? You see it as in college? He's still like this to this day. Towards the end of his time at Cambridge, he had confided to his 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'd looked at the students and asked who's going to set up a company, the answer would have been nobody.

Demis was the exception. He saw no reason not to start a company, so he did. And he talks about this. I'm not going to sit around wondering what might have been. You only get one life, he said. That part reminded me that Steve Jobs mentor, who's the founder of Atari, observed that Steve Jobs only had one speed, that a young Steve Jobs only had one speed, and that speed was Go.

Demis is the same way. And so he's going to start his first company. This is where his charisma, his persuasion, his ability to articulate his ideas, his passion all come into play. His powers of persuasion were uncanny. Demis had what we called a Jedi mind trick. He would kind of be like, you will believe the things I'm going to say, and then people did believe them. And so his first idea is to start this gaming company called Elixir.

Like he said before, Games versus Path into AI. He has all kinds of trouble now and later with venture capitalists. At this point, they said they'll give him some money, but you have to give up more than half the equity of the company. And the reason I bring this out to you is because I think this is one of the most pronounced aspects of his personality. He says if there was one thing that Demas hated, it was to be controlled by anyone. And this is what he said. They wanted our souls in exchange for the money. Again, this is very fascinating. We'll get to this later. But one reason that Demis sells DeepMind to Google was to avoid having to be what I think he calls it like the hamster wheel of raising money from investors. He rightly saw that as just a giant distraction to his mission. And that leads us to another reoccurring theme throughout his life and throughout the book is just Demis is insanely practical. He also is going to learn from every single experience that he has. And so as Demis talked about starting a company, his ambition had been to build powerful AI, not just to design. video games. In founding Elixir, he was balancing his ambition against his practical side. His ultimate dream was creating a Manhattan project for artificial intelligence,

that metaphor, that idea. Hey, we're going to create a Manhattan project for artificial intelligence. That's used constantly throughout the book. And in the middle of this, there's just a phenomenal line because I keep trying to hound the fact that Demis hates losing, that he is hyper-competitive. This is what he, this is how he describes what losing feels like to him. It's like my soul on fire. And so one way that Demas learns to be more practical is by making a mistake. He has this idea for this game called Republic. Republic was this overly ambitious, basically technically impossible idea of a game. It's going to lead to the failure of his first company. And there's just this really great point that he makes here. Over the next couple of years, Republic's release date

was pushed back repeatedly. As the keeper of the vision, Demas fought a rearguard action against compromise. And it took time for him to recognize the trap that his own charisma, Who would have thought that you can actually inspire people too much, he said? Well, you can because you can get to the point where you're deluding your team, and then they are deluding you also. It's like, I'm making this judgment that this is possible because the engineers are telling me it's possible, but they're only telling me it's possible because I've over-inspired them, Demis said.

So in fact, none of us were getting real feedback. His co-founder talks about how to communicate and debate and really just persuade Demis. you had to push the conversation to the point where he got more and more intense and defended his positions more and more strongly. The stronger he got, the closer you were. Then eventually he might go quiet. That's when he absorbed the message.

And so after this, he's thinking about what to do. This is right before he found deep mind. And the author does a great job of describing, again, just how he's learning from everything and how all these experiences fit together. I marveled how Demis' experience and ideas appeared to slot together. His curiosity about physics has spurred him to work on AI.

the ultimate tool to unlock science. His curiosity about AI had led him to investigate the human brain, the existence proof for intelligence. His work on simulations and video games echoed his research on simulations in the mind and the influences of Emmanuel Kant, of that book Godol, Escher & Bach, and neuroscience had pushed Demis towards the same bottom line, that information was the fundamental unit of reality. A futuristic computer, a powerful AI, might be limitless, infinite.

And so there is all kinds of interesting. interesting characters in this book. I'm going to focus mainly on Demis, considering how important AI is becoming in our world. I would highly recommend reading the book. There is a lot of fascinating stories about how they actually built the technology that are in the book that I think you should read. And then Demis is constantly interacting with and his stories, you know, weaving in and out of all these other phenomenal entrepreneurs and well-known investors. The first one is Peter Thiel. Demis needs money for deep mind, so he finds a way to pitch Peter Thiel. They're at this party at a conference. This has a set up pitching Peter Thiel with yet another startup story and doing so in the

middle of a crowded party, Demas hooked Teal with chess. So he starts talking about chess with Peter, because he knew that Peter was obsessed with chess. Teal then invites Demis and his co-founder over his house the next day to explain their ambitious venture. When they do so, says Teal began to think this project was an A-plus on the science and maybe an F on the business model. But he had also had a further thought. Demis was an extreme case of an authentic entrepreneur, not a mercenary who starts with a desire to get rich from a startup, then casts around for a plausible idea, but rather a missionary who feels compelled to work on a particular challenge than 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 say that people aren't really entrepreneurs in the abstract, but there's maybe one great company that somebody has in them, Peter said. It was Demis's destiny to build this one. And so he's raising money from Peter Thiel. They build this business plan, this deck of deep mind.

There's just a couple of things I want to pull out from this business plan from this deck that I thought was interesting. In the deck, it has a quote from Bill Gates. Remember the idea for an AI company's ridiculous at this time. This is the quote. If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence so machines can learn, that would be worth 10 Microsofts. And then it lays out what they're trying to do. As the business plan explained, the human brain had limited storage capacity and humans had limited lifespans. Grouping humans together resulted in diminishing returns because big organizations are sluggish.

In sum, the intricacy of society's most pressing challenges lay beyond the reach of human capabilities. AGI is the solution to this problem. Perhaps more audaciously, DeepMind asserted that its ultra-ambitious conception of AI made progress more likely. Other AI research sought to maximize the chances of success by focusing on narrow tasks, training a system to recognize images, for example. In contrast, DeepMind was out to build. build agents, not merely systems. The difference was that agents would be more general and proactive. Rather than being engineered by humans to master a single finite task, agents would learn broadly

and autonomously, mastering a wide range of problems as they interacted with their environment. The jump in complexity was vast. Rather than building the digital equivalent of a house, Deep Mine aspired to build a city. And so Demas and one of his co-founders, there's three co-founders. It's Demis, Shane Leg, and Mustafa Suleiman. And so Demis and Mustafa are out trying to raise money. There's just so many bizarre stories in the book. I've heard so many investor horror stories from founders, most of which are not repeated publicly, unfortunately.

Let's just say there's just a lot of creeps and weirdos out there. So when I got to this section, my note was very simple. WTF. It says in September 2010, Demis and Mustafa appeared before a strange kind of investment committee. David Gammon declared himself ready to commit capital, but he'd only go forward if DeepMind did things his way. Entrepreneur is seeking his support required to visit his home and pitch to Gammon, his wife, and his three teenage sons.

Each family member would get an equal say on whether to invest. I said to Demis, if you can't explain this to my younger son, you're not going to get his vote. There was a painfully large gap between the grand science of the DeepMind business plan and an invitation to chat with a middle schooler. That is just flat out bizarre. So eventually Demis raises money from Peter Thiel. There's some interesting background here that I think you'd be interested in.

As a general matter, Peter Thiel doubted that going on boards was a good use of his partner's time. Startups should be left to sink or swim. The art of venture capital, he liked to say, was to back contrarian ideas, not coach company founders. Teal had taken the unusual position that collective decision-making should be avoided. The way he saw things, if investments were chosen based on voting, the founder's fund portfolio would consist of middle-of-the-road startups to which nobody objected. Given that all the profits and venture come from a few improbable moonshots, this sort of consensus portfolio would deliver mediocre performance. Founders Fund wired 2.3 million.

This gives you an idea of just how hard it was to raise money for his idea, for Demis's idea. Founders Fund wired 2.3 million to deep mine, and they assumed ownership of a bit less than half the company. There was no other capital available. This is December 2010. Peter Thiel reappears over and over again the story. He actually has one of my all-time favorite quotes.

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completely undeterred. This is very fascinating how they recruit some of the first employees to deep mine. This is a scientific challenge. As scientific startups, you need blue sky thinkers who wander into the unknown. We only wanted hardcore believers. We would go to these conferences and tell people were starting an AGI company. 80% of the people would roll their eyes at us, literally roll their eyes at us and turn around and walk away. We figured that this was a very efficient way to discover who we should be talking to.

And they also had a really interesting pitch to recruits. It was this. The culture of academia could be both boringly cautious and terrifyingly competitive, boring because it pursued incremental advances, terrifying because scientists cut each other's throats to be the first to publish. At Deep Mine, we're promising the,

opposite experience, the thrilling pursuit of the big leap and the near absence of rivals. We are going to do stuff where there's no competition because no one thinks it's possible. Blessed are those who believed before there was any evidence. And so one of the first things they do, I think this is really important. The fact that this, to me, is really the power of biography because you see that, you see the evolution of their thinking and their behavior over time. He is learning. He's learning from his failed experiment with his previous company.

So deep mind, what they want to do is they're trying to create an agent that can make plans and achieve goals in multiple environments. And so they start out on what they think is the perfect environment for testing an agent, all the video games that were designed in the 1970s and 80s by Atari. And this is why. Given the primitive state of video graphics in that era, the computing power required to crack Atari would be affordable. Given that Atari had released dozens of games, an agent would have plenty of opportunities to prove it could be general. Given that most Atari games featured a constantly updating score, the agent would have the feedback it needed to learn how to play better. Demas had grown since his experience with Elixir. In both cases, Demas 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 that overreach had doomed the project. At DeepMind, the ultimate goal was even grander, but Demas had let people tinker, while he was building out the scientific team, not setting a demanding goal for them. And then once the team was assembled, Demis had shown exquisite judgment. And all the while, he's preaching his vision, his mission. The way Demis saw things true general intelligence would make almost anything possible, surpassing the internet, the printing press, or even the industrial revolution and importance.

But he has that combination of grand ambition and pragmatism. He's schedule captured the two sides of Demis' persona. When he stayed awake into the small hours of the morning, reading and thinking and dreaming, he reveled in his maximalist ambition. So his schedule was something like at 10 p.m. until like four in the morning. That's when he's doing this. Then he goes to sleep for a few hours, then he goes to the office. When he goes to the office, it says when he arrived at the office the next day,

he focused on getting to the next rung of the latter. Again, this combination of grand ambition and pragmatism. Now, there's a bunch of other characters in the book, some of the most successful and wealthiest people in the world. Elon Musk is all over this book. Larry Page, obviously founder of Google buys DeepMind all over this book. And so there's a ton of interesting. interesting stories and anecdotes in the book. I just want to pull out one of them.

Luke Nosek was the investor at Founders Fund that wanted to make the deep mind investment. So Luke Nossack flew back to California on Elon's private jet, accompanied by Larry Page. The conversation on the flight turned to AI. Demis had visited Elon at SpaceX. Elon and Demis had discussed which mission mattered most. Space travel or developing AGI. Elon had declared that humans needed to colonize Mars in case disaster struck Earth. Demis had countered that killer AI robots might be one such disaster, but that the AI could obviously follow humans to Mars if it wanted to.

The two men had forged a competitive friendship, and Elon had decided that Demas was right. Powerful artificial intelligence might indeed be more consequential than spaceflight. Elon promised to invest in DeepMind. Now, back to this flight that Larry Page and Elon and Luke Nosek are on. I think this is how Larry Page found out about DeepMind. So Elon says, there's only one AI company that I think is going to work. I'm an investor in that company, DeepMind. Now let's go back to another character, Peter Thiel.

A lot of this book at this part of the story. It's just a lot of back and forth and ups and downs in raising money. Keep that in mind because everybody criticizes Demis for selling to Google. But if you were going through what he was going through, he saw as a giant distraction. And he needed a backer with essentially unlimited resources. But there's just some interesting stories about how all these other players on the board were viewing Demas. Peter Thiel barely saw the deep mind team. And he felt instinctively suspicious of a fellow chess player.

A man who had spent his formative years mentally crushing opponents should be treated with caution, Theo reckoned. And so while these ups and downs and this painful fundraising process is going on, Demas gets this email from Google. And he's willing to meet with him. This is why. Given his testy relationship with his venture capital backers, he was eager. A deep-pocketed parent company could free him from the endless fundraising negotiations that cluttered his life and pulled his attention away from Deep Mind's research. I was having these inane conversations nonstop with investors.

I felt my brain was atrophying. I'm talking about the biggest invention ever and they keep coming back to where's the widget? And I'm like, I'm going to revolutionize all widgets so I can pick you a random widget if you want me to, but you obviously haven't gotten the point if you're asking me this. And so the fundraising was so bad

at one point they almost ran out of money. Somebody would say, you know, we're going to, we're in for X amount and then they'd renege. And again, I think this just pushes Demis back and to choosing Google. Deep Mines' near-death experience forced Demas to come to terms with the fact that Blue Sky Research was a poor fit for venture capital.

It was time to find a new backer. And so he describes why he'd sold to Google and he describes Larry Page's pitch to him, which I thought was interesting. Demis' goal was to create AGI. So why bother with the idea of an independent deep mine? Google was the obvious place to realize his ambition. Why don't you take advantage of what I've already created

Larry Page, asked Demis? It was a recruitment pitch that he'd used success 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. If my real mission was to build AGI, then why don't I use all the resources that he's accumulated? I thought that was a pretty good argument. Would I be happier looking back on building a multi-billion dollar company, or helping solve intelligence? It was an easy choice. When we went on that walk together, I felt he would have taken his own offer. The contrast with Deep Mines venture capital backers was obvious. Demis had a demonstration

struggled to persuade founders fund that DeepMine would end up changing every widget in the world. With Page, he didn't even have to make the argument. I was fed up with scrambling around trying to justify what I knew was the biggest thing of all time, Demis recalled. I just thought, look, I'll go to Google, I'll get a shitload of computers, and then I'll solve intelligence. And so then Elon Musk hears about some negotiations between Demis and Google. And so then he winds up calling Demis because he wants to buy DeepMind so Google doesn't get it.

It says when Elon found that Google was about to buy DeepMine, he said, Demas shouldn't lose control of his company. We can't have a giant corporation control AGI. This is not a good thing for humanity. And so then Elon calls Demis and says, how about if Tesla acquires you? Demas pointed out that Tesla was not generating enough cash to support DeepMind's research. Okay, how about if SpaceX acquires you? Demas points out that SpaceX didn't have the computer power that DeepMind was going to need. And so for the people that follow tech, all these characters keep popping up in the story. You have Elon, you have Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg pops up for a little bit. A few years from where we are in the story, Sam Altman pops up. But in

January 2014, Demas goes ahead with Google, and this is something he's never regretted. Google bought DeepMind for $650 million. Demas netted $136 million. Not long after the Google acquisition, DeepMine was paying $260 million in staff costs annually, six times more than its total spending during its first three years of existence. From Demas' perspective, the advantages of the sale were overwhelming. And so in the documentary of the thinking game, he talks about this. He says, our investors didn't want to sell, but we decided this was the best thing for the mission. We were underselling in terms of value before it matured, and you could have sold deep mine for more money in the future. The reason is because there's no time to waste. There are so many things

that have to be done while I'm still alive and my brain is still in gear. And then he has a very compelling argument for this. How many billions would you trade for another five years of life to do what you set out to do? And so one of the things that they're working on is they want to build AlphaGo. They want to build a system that would defeat a world champion at Go. This exchange between Demis and Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders Google, says a lot about Demas's ambition. Demis told Sergey that he wanted to build a computer that would defeat the world champion at Go.

Brin seemed incredulous. Wouldn't that be impossible? Great, Demis thought to himself. If he thinks it's impossible, it should be pretty impressive if we do it. Now, there is a lot of detail in the book and in the documentary about how they do this. But what jumped out to me is

one of the most interesting reoccurring themes in the book was this idea of using AI to come up with ideas or strategies or moves that aren't human-like. And this progresses to the point where it's like they aren't even built on what humans have done in the past. A lot of my highlights center around this.

I think this idea is fascinating. And so at the beginning, it says if you pattern match what humans do, it's not going to take you all the way to beating the top human. The system needs to discover new moves which aren't human-like. We need to build a machine that would search the infinity of permutations in Go

and come up entirely novel strategies. The early version of our Go system played as a human would. It rediscovered certain strategies that humans had learned over millennia. Then it discovered that certain time-honored human strategies can actually be counteracted, so it discarded them. As the system became stronger, it played like nothing we've ever seen.

It came up with a style that was completely alien. There are so many examples in the book about this, I think are very, very fascinating. So it goes back to, now we're a couple years into this, and everything with Google was going well, Google had liberated him from the fundraising hamster wheel. Google had allowed him to retain Deep Mind's independent culture in London. Google had even granted his followers' privileged status. People that worked at DeepMine could get into any Google office globally. But people that worked at Google were barred from DeepMind's premises.

In some weeks, a single research team at DeepMind might gobble up more computational resources than Google's worldwide Gmail network, which had 900 million users. And so Elon and others see what's going on, and this is going to lead to the founding of OpenAAA as a counter to DeepMine and Google. Sometime in early 2015, Elon and Demas had lunch. Over lunch, Elon kept up his griping, effectively accusing. deep mind and Google of irresponsibility. A month after their encounter, Elon received an email from Sam Altman. The email he wrote to Elon said, I've been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to

stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first. And you can see this as people begin to understand more and more on the importance of developing EGI. You have all these other people that jump into this competition. When a technology of infinite potential comes into view, there will never be a quiet

consensus about who should control it. With so much at stake, power, money, scientific glory, the future of humanity, conflict is unavoidable. And so Demis is practical. He knows the people he's dealing with. He knows these kind of people are going to want to start their own thing. Elon and Sam Altman team up to launch Open AI, a not-for-profit lab explicitly aimed at breaking the Google Deep Mind AGI monopoly. Demis said, if you have powerful people who are able to understand the impact of the technology, they're not just going to sit on the sidelines. They won't be content to just be your advisors. So obviously, what was going on was our supposed advisors were really our rivals. And so then when I go back to this idea of using AI to generate this alien, like non-human

ideas, they continue to improve AlphaGo. Now they have this idea called AlphaGo Zero. The idea is that rather than training the agent initial in expert human games, it would have to learn exclusively by playing against itself, by experimenting with random moves and discovering which ones generated a reward signal. Learning only from self-play, the system outclass its predecessor by mile. By unshackling itself from human wisdom, the model had discovered strategies unknown to mortal players, arriving at a new understanding of Go's mysteries.

Humans had not understood how little they had understood. AI stood in judgment over centuries of human wisdom, vindicating some verdicts and tossing out others. And then some of my favorite parts of the book is just, you can just tell that he believes that this is like his fate, this is his destiny. He's actually interesting, before I read this excerpt from Demis, which I found fascinating. There was an interesting few sentences from Peter Thiel.

And he's talking about Demis. He says, geniuses are seldom brilliant in a general way. They tend to be brilliantly suited to a particular mission. My friend Daniel Eck was the founder of Spotify. He calls this founder problem fit. I think it's a really interesting idea. Let's go back to this idea that Demis, you could just tell. He believes this is fate.

This is destiny. He's got a beautiful way of explaining himself. The way AI has developed is a bit like the Industrial Revolution. It developed in a certain way. but that was kind of lucky. Suppose at the start of the Industrial Revolution we had found out about energy and engines, but then imagine that there were no coal or oil in the ground. After all, there didn't have to be. Dead dinosaurs and ancient trees just waiting there for 60 million years ready to be dug out? It's kind of unreasonable if you think about it. Why wouldn't they just

decay in the ground and become useless? Quite convenient that they didn't. And maybe that speaks to another conversation we could have about what's really going on here. Why would we have this coincidence? The analogy here is the internet has been for AI what coal and oil were for the Industrial Revolution. You could just literally drill a hole in the ground and get black gold. Today we can just download all of the internet. Neither of these resources had to be there. The dead dinosaurs are the internet. Humanity built the internet for a different purpose.

And kind of amazingly, we woke up one day and realized that we've got the equivalent of oil. And so you and I have talked about that Demas is fiercely independent. it. He's this outlier, doing things his own way. And at certain times, that could be a strength and at certain times it could be a weakness. At this point, the story, Open AI gets ahead of DeepMind, even though it was founded much later. And the book goes into detail about the two different paths that they're taking at the moment. But I think the author describes how understanding Demis's personality and his life history could have accounted for him to make this mistake. And so it says at some point in this period, DeepMind should have pivoted to language models,

just as Open AI did. But DeepMind was too excited by its own research. It was accustomed to being the world's top AI lab. It could scarcely imagine that a copycat outfit might overtake it. Besides, Demas rebelled against the prospect of following Open AI's example. All of his life, he had beaten his own path, his obsessive childhood chess, his underage moonlighting for bullfrog, his precocious impatience with the AI skeptical consensus at Cambridge, his un-British appetite for entrepreneurship, his improbable leap from game design to neuroscience. Demis was far more original and far more of a contrarian than most of the self-identified contrarians of Silicon Valley. And then one of my favorite maxims is that actions expressed priority, so we see what's important

to Demis by looking at his actions. Since he was in college, he was obsessed with this idea of trying to solve protein folding. Again, this is what he's going to win the Nobel Prize for. And at this point in the story, he thinks that AI has progressed sufficiently to solve this problem for the first time in human history. And it talks about why this is so important. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They provide the structure and also the function of organs and muscles, hormones and hair, blood and brain cells. The idea of solving protein folding or predicting the complex shapes that proteins assume was both fascinating its own right and almost certain to unlock medical advances. Knowing the structure of proteins would help researchers to come up with drug

molecules that could bind to their surfaces, knowing how those structures formed might unlock cures for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, since both diseases were thought to be linked to incorrectly folded proteins. And when they wind up solving this, they make the technology and all their research free to the world. And when Deep Mind's project was completed, the company gifted its results to science, allowing researchers all over the world to make free use of its discovery. And then one thing that Demis has in common with most of history's greatest entrepreneurs is like when you do something great, you don't sleep on the wind, you don't rest on the laurels, you just go and do something else. It says, when Demis solves it's a lot of people, it says, when Demis

solve something big. He doesn't pause to spend much time savoring the achievement. And so Demis talks about the fact that he's unreasonable, that he's always pushing for more. There's people inside the company. Actually talk about the fact that he's never satisfied. They always wants more. They have this great line, this great line about it. They call Demis driven development. At Deep Mind, we have something called Demis driven development. If a review meeting with Demis has been scheduled for Tuesday, you were urged to complete the next round of upgrades by Monday. No matter how many upgrades arrive, Demis wants more of them. And so something that Demis would repeat, way a decade. More than the decade before, he actually had proof of this, is the fact that he really

believed that AI could offer scientific miracles. And he talks about the fact that belief comes to forability, says you definitely can't crack a hard problem if the person leading the team thinks it's not possible. And so one example of what the miracles that AI could offer is what they did with Alpha Fold. Hundreds of academic scientists had spent decades on protein folding. How was it that the Deep Mind's team, numbering perhaps 20 at its peak, had defeated all of them? And so then the book gets into the invention of Chatchipt, and this is where Demis realizes he's in a fight for his life. This is war. It says the night before ChatGPT's release, OpenAI's team placed a bets on how many people might

try the tool by the end of the weekend. Some guessed a few thousand. Others guessed tens of thousands. To be safe, the company readied enough server capacity for 100,000 users. Within five days, they collected a million users. Within two months, it had amassed an astonishing 100 million, making it the fastest growing consumer application ever. This is Demis's response. And again, he is pathological. The way he was described in the book by somebody else is pathologically competitive. At the end of April, 2003, I visited Demas and

asked how he was feeling. This is wartime he answered. Open A& Microsoft have literally parked the tanks on the lawn. And so Demas also spends time thinking about the motivations of the people that he's competing with. And I think this is really important. I think Steve Jobs put it best. Steve said, the older I get, the more I'm convinced that motives make so much. difference. Steve would use HP as his North Star example, that their primary goal, back when the founders were running it, obviously, that their primary goal was to make great products, not be the biggest or the richest. And that distinction to jobs wasn't cosmetic, it was foundational. And so Demas is talking about Sam Altman. And it says, Demas recalled what Paul Graham wrote. Paul Graham was one of

Altman's closest professional mentors. And Paul wrote, Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he'd be the king. Demis said, I think there's a question for anyone trying to build AGI. What are your reasons for building it? My reasons are scientific. Some are definitely building it for other purposes. Demis was not just furious.

He was ferociously competitive. And so this is the response to OpenAI and ChatchipT that they do. Larry Page insisted that Google should do everything conceivable to catch up. Otherwise, it would be nowhere. Demis set about preparing his troops to think differently. He declared that DeepMind's broad portfolio of Blue Sky Research bets would have to be paired back. The company would stop publishing mission-critical research that competitors could copy. It would focus on engineering and not just science.

Researchers would have to make the mental shift from peacetime to wartime. They also planned to merge Google Brain and DeepMind. Not even Google could afford the luxury of duplicate research teams. They began to work on their next-generation language model, which would be called Gemini. Google would put its research, computing power and marketing muscle behind a single chatbot.

And there's a great quote from this researcher on DeepMind about how valuable this time was to the company. My view is that we probably needed to be second for a while just to light a fire under our own ass. There's nothing like public humiliation for galvanizing action.

And then you see Demas was just built for this time. His entire life he was preparing for this. He just loves competition. Demas was in his element. The greatest tournament of his career was just getting started. Everything is competitive, and competition brings this mad rush,

Demos said. I've always got this in the back of my mind. And he's just describing this time in his life. It's been a hard year. It's partly because everyone knows now would have known for 20 years or more, that AI is the most important thing ever. Venture capitalists are funding anything that moves.

Mid-level engineers are getting offers to do startups even though they're not suited to running a company. You've got the biggest Titans, the most ambitious, most ferocious, most aggressive, most aggressive people in the world crowding into the sector. DeepMind embraced a strict unity. All team members poured their energies into improving one single model.

Next, they embraced meritocracy. Any team member was welcome to propose an improvement to the model and test it. If the upgrade boosted performance, it was added to the master code on which everyone was building. Seniority, force of personality, dazzling theoretical claims as to why something should work, none of that affected what went into the program. Only measurement mattered. And so since Demis is running all Google's AI, he says, the project is so big that I don't code anymore. I don't design things directly, so my skills are more about holding a hundred different projects in my mind.

Context switching between complicated things with negative minutes of time between. Laying out division, picking the right intermediate targets on the way to the big goal, and nurturing people to take things on. The word I'm using the most is relentless, relentless progress, relentless shipping, a relentless production machine for innovation. Less than two years after the messy shotgun marriage that created Google DeepMine, Demis' team had closed the technical gap. It was a considerable achievement. And so they talk about where they see this going. Humans are forever conceiving long-term objectives and planning what they need to do next week and next month in order to realize them.

Future AIs would behave in the same way. Task, for example, to help solve energy scarcity by inventing a superconductor, an AI might draw up a reading list, conduct experiments, invent novel materials, and so on, pursuing its goal over the space of a year or more. And it all goes back to the fact that Demas is a missionary, that he's on a mission, and that he's very clear about what his motives are. I'm doing this for knowledge and science. This is my whole life's work.

I have to do what's necessary. The mission is in me. It is infused in me. You can't separate it from me. I'm definitely not denying it can be strong-willed or difficult. I think I have to be. If I was like a reed in the wind, I wouldn't be doing my job as a leader. Demis's core theme is that money and power were not ends in themselves.

They were a means to scientific knowledge.