# DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on the future of AI

Segment00:00:00 – 00:05:00

Full episode transcript, trimmed to training segment.

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[0000:00] Steven Johnson: Welcome to the TED Interview. I'm your host, Steven Johnson. When future tech historians look back at the first few decades of the 21st century, I suspect they will point to a day in late 2017 as one of the enduring milestones from that period. The day the deep learning software program, AlphaZero played 44 million games of chess against a duplicate version of itself.

The software had begun the day preloaded with only the basic rules of chess. Pawns can only move straight ahead unless they're capturing a piece. Bishops move diagonally. You win by checkmating the king, and so on. But by the end of those 44 million games, which unfolded in less than a day, AlphaZero had become arguably the most dominant chess player the world had ever seen.

AlphaZero is one of a number of pioneering AI projects created by the UK company, DeepMind, founded in 2010 by one of the most fascinating minds in the digital world, Demis Hassabis. Now, if you wanna feel good about your own CV, I suggest you cover your ears right now because Hassabis has had a very productive career for a guy who is just in his mid-forties.

As a child, he was one of the top-ranked junior chess players in the world. In his mid-teens, he talked his way into a job as one of the lead designers of a best-selling video game. After getting degrees in neuroscience from Cambridge and University College - London, he founded DeepMind in his early thirties, selling the company to Google only four years after its founding.

Now, you can probably imagine that when we first started sketching out ideas for a series of interviews about the future of intelligence, Demis Hassabis was very high on the list of people we wanted to talk to. But the strange thing about DeepMind, like a lot of the AI labs at big tech companies right now, is that while the organization is working on some of the most revolutionary and controversial new technology out there, almost none of it is available yet for ordinary consumers to interact with.

DeepMind is working on neural nets that can predict the shape of proteins, which may someday help design a drug that you might take to cure cancer or reverse Parkinson's. They're working on an AI that might be able to control nuclear fusion reactors, which could one day give us a source of renewable energy at a much lower cost.

But most of these projects are still behind the curtain or accessible to a small number of outside researchers. So for the next hour, we're going to ask Demis to give us a bit of a peek behind that curtain and talk about where he thinks AI is going to take us in the coming years. One of the smartest minds in the world talking about the future of intelligence.

That's this week's TED interview.

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[0003:11] Steven Johnson: Demis Hassabis, welcome to the TED Interview.

[0003:14] Demis Hassabis: Thanks for having me.

[0003:15] Steven Johnson: We’re really excited to have you on the program, and we're gonna get into some very profound questions about intelligence and machine learning and the future of health and creativity. But, I wanted to start with, well, with video games, which is fine, which is appropriate for, for DeepMind's history, but also in a way that perhaps some listeners don't know very appropriate for, for your history in that really one of the first jobs you had as a teenager was being one of the key designers of a, of a classic nineties simulation game called Theme Park, which I played back in the day, and I also played Black and White, which I think you maybe had a hand in as well, which is a fascinating game.

And I, I guess I wanted to start there just on a kind of biographical note, like how did you get the gig at Theme Park, and how did, how did that lead into the work you're doing with AI?

[0004:08] Demis Hassabis: Sure. I mean, uh, yeah, no games is a good, is a good place to start with me. Um, I've been playing games and fascinated by games since I can remember, um, starting with chess, which I learned to play when I was, uh, four years old. And then I, you know, that captained many England, uh, junior chess teams. And actually, for a while, that was what I was going to potentially do, be a professional chess player.

Um, but actually the thing that it left on me, the imprint it left on me was thinking about thinking. So you know, as you try and improve, especially as a junior chess player, you're trying to improve your decision-making and your planning and all the things that make you good at chess, and that chess teaches you, including things like visualization and imagination.

And for me at least, it made me start thinking about what was it about the brain that was coming up with these ideas, sometimes mistakes, and got me fascinated about the brain and neuroscience and, and intelligence. Um, and then I discovered computers a bit later and learn how to program, and, uh, those different loves of computers and programming and games obviously naturally came together in designing and programming video games.

And I was lucky enough to, you know, come second in some national programming competition when I was around 13, 14. And, and the winner got a job at, was what was then the premier software house in Europe called Bullfrog Productions. They made amazing games, some of my favorite games like Populous and so, So I, I rang the, the, the, the CEO up and, and said, “Can I come for work experience?”