A conversation with Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis

Key ideas

Hassabis explains how DeepMind funded and ran a 20-year deep tech bet: interim milestones, a London talent advantage, hard early fundraising, and planning for success responsibly.

From a machine transcript of the audio. Quotes link to the moment they are said.

1. 1

   Break a long bet into milestones

   Hassabis tells founders of deep tech companies that an ambitious 20-year goal has to be broken down. He says choosing the right interim milestones proves progress to backers, the team and yourself, and names Atari games and protein folding as DeepMind's.

2. 2

   Start when the ingredients line up

   Hassabis says that around 2010 he could see the pieces arriving: early deep learning papers, widely available GPUs and some understanding of the brain's algorithms. He says the early bets on learning and generality held up and that the roadmap was more or less on track. He still guesses that a small handful of breakthroughs beyond scaling are needed for human-level AI.

3. 3

   Expect early funding to be hard

   Hassabis describes getting the first seed round done as almost impossible, and says he took no salary for the first couple of years. He says UK investors had little understanding of or appetite for so long a payoff. In the US, he recalls, the backers were mostly individual entrepreneurs who understood such a journey, not VCs.

4. 4

   Build where talent lacks options

   Hassabis says he stayed in London partly because strong UK and European graduates who did not want finance had few other options. He says this gave DeepMind an advantage for its first five to seven years, until multinationals and VCs caught on.

5. 5

   Plan for what success would mean

   Hassabis says that because they believed AGI was possible within 20 years, they treated ethics and safety as necessary from the start. Under high uncertainty he favors cautious optimism and what he calls being bold and responsible over moving fast and breaking things. He acknowledges this gets hard in a commercial frenzy.

In Demis’s words

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