When Demis Hassabis pitched DeepMind to a handful of venture capitalists in 2010, his business plan was comically audacious. “Step 1: Solve intelligence. Step 2: Use intelligence to solve everything else,” he recalled in a conversation with Stanford University President Jonathan Levine at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “And people were pretty confused. But we really meant it.”
Sixteen years later, the “gist” of that plan “worked incredibly well,” says Hassabis, who went from a young chess prodigy to a video game developer, neuroscientist and Nobel Prize-winning AI pioneer. Now, he’s on a mission to create “the ultimate tool for science” with his decision to deliver AlphaFold, a breakthrough AI system that predicts the structure of proteins. “It was clearly the right thing to do,” he says.
The most powerful technology ever created by humanity is about to arrive in the “most intensely competitive environment” in history, layered with geopolitical conflict. Hassabis is concerned about a “race to the bottom” among top AI research institutes and calls for “smart regulation” that is “swift enough” to ensure alignment. The stakes are so high that artificial general intelligence could have “10 times the impact and 10 times the speed of the industrial revolution.”
That future is just around the corner, Hassabis says. “I think in 10 years we will find ourselves standing at the foot of a singularity.”
AI@GSB, the dean’s applied AI initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), and Stanford School of Medicine spoke with Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, about the frontiers of artificial intelligence and what it means for how we live, work, and thrive.
