Topic
16 facts from 2 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
1900
Hassabis proposes testing an AI by giving it all knowledge up to 1900 and seeing whether it could derive special and general relativity like Einstein.
“have a cutoff of knowledge cutoff of 1900, and then give the system everything that was, you know, that was written up to 1900.”
1980s
Hassabis grew up with a Spectrum and then a Commodore Amiga 500, which he calls his favourite computer and where he learned programming.
“I had a Spectrum and then a a Commodore, Amiga 500, which was my my favorite computer ever. And that's why I learned all my programming.”
1990s
Hassabis worked on the game Theme Park, an open-world simulation where each player's experience was unique.
“So games like Theme Park that I worked on, where everybody's game experience would be unique to them, right?”
1990s
Hassabis says he worked on the early stages of the game Black & White, which contained what he considers still probably the best learning AI in a game.
“Black and White, uh, was the game that I worked on. Early stages of that that had the still probably the best AI learning AI in it.”
2010
Hassabis says that when DeepMind started in 2010 he did not pay himself for a couple of years because they could not raise money.
“I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, you know, I didn't even pay myself for a couple of years”
2010
DeepMind was founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.
“DeepMind was founded in 2010 by a neuroscience PhD named Demis Hassabis.”
2030
Hassabis estimates roughly a 50% chance of AGI within five years, by about 2030.
“My estimate is sort of 50 chance by in the next five years, so, you know, by 2030, let's say.”
Undated
Demis Hassabis says proteins fold in milliseconds in the body, a problem DeepMind's AlphaFold has now solved computationally.
“You know, proteins fold in milliseconds in our bodies, so somehow physics solves this problem that we've now also solved computationally.”
Undated
Hassabis says Google's Veo video model appears to learn how materials behave just from watching videos, whereas he found hand-writing physics engines painstakingly hard.
“yet somehow these systems are, you know, reverse engineering from just watching YouTube videos. So presumably what's happening is it's extracting some underlying structure around how these materials behave.”
Undated
Hassabis says AlphaGo used Monte Carlo tree search, which found the novel strategy known as Move 37 in Go.
“AlphaGo, we just used Monte Carlo tree search, right? And that's what found Move 37, the new, uh, kind of never seen before strategy in Go.”
Undated
Hassabis says he has wanted to build a virtual simulation of a cell for about 25 years.
“I've had this idea, you know, of wanting to do that for maybe more like 25 years.”
Undated
Hassabis says he would start a virtual cell project with yeast, a well-understood single-celled organism that Paul Nurse studied.
“And I'd probably start with a yeast cell, and partly that's what Paul Nurse studied, because a yeast cell is like a full organism, that's a single cell, right?”
Undated
Hassabis argues that cheap clean energy would solve water access through desalination, which he says currently is too expensive for most countries.
“the water access problem goes away because you can just use desalination. We have the technology, it's just too expensive.”
Undated
Hassabis predicts AI's impact will be around ten times that of the industrial revolution and arrive roughly ten times faster.
“I think what we're gonna see is something like probably 10 times the impact the industrial revolution had, and but 10 times faster as well, right?”
Undated
Hassabis did a neuroscience PhD studying how the brain works, focusing on imagination and memory in the hippocampus.
“to look at how the brain works, especially imagination and memory. I focused on the hippocampus”
Undated
Hassabis says Roger Penrose worked with neuroscientists to seek quantum mechanical effects in the brain, which Hassabis says have not been convincingly found.
“He collaborated with a lot of good neuroscientists to see if he could find mechanisms for quantum mechanics behavior in the brain.”
Episodes