Demis Hassabis on Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry
Google’s AI boss made OpenAI issue code red. Now he wants to solve disease. | Titans and Disruptors
A solid overview, but most of the AlphaFold, agents, product integration, and abundance material is familiar from other appearances. Worth sampling chiefly for the unusually direct account of merging DeepMind and Google Brain; otherwise, regular followers can skip.
Mind and Google Brain. And actually, I think often, as a collector, we don't get enough credit for the fact that, you know, I think about 90% of the modern AI industry is built on technology or discoveries made by one of those two groups, from transformers to AlphaGo and deep reinforcement learning. So we have, when we still have, I think, the deepest and broadest research bench. So we have incredible talent, I think, better than anywhere else in the world, by a long way. But it was getting complicated having two groups, especially given the amount of compute needed in this scaling era. So that was really why we had to put the two groups together, so we could pull all of the talents together working on a single project in Gemini.
Demis Hassabis discusses the strategic decision to sell DeepMind to Google, the scientific and medical ambitions behind AlphaFold and Isomorphic, and the organizational choices that accelerated Google's AI work. He also forecasts near-term growth in AI agents and longer-term gains in health, science, energy, and exploration.