The Thinking Game
For anyone who is curious about AI and the future, I strongly recommend the documentary on Demis Hassabi and his journey building Deepmind, now part of the Alphabet aka Google empire. It’s really well done and free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
The man is brilliant and maniacal, accomplished chess player at young age, early admittance to Cambridge Queens College, man behind the video game Theme Park. At age 11, he came to the hard realization. "Although I love chess this is not the thing I want to spend my entire life on." Thankfully for humanity he did as he started focusing on exploring AI before anyone else, leading him to cofounder Deepmind, where wanted to build AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which is an intelligence just like the brain that learns many things versus AI which is single task focussed and specific.
He built and modelled Deepmind on the best of academia with a collection of some of the smartest people from around the world. "The founding principle of this place (The Institute for Advanced Study), it’s the idea of unfettered intellectual pursuits, even if you don't know what you are exploring. Will result in some cool things, and sometimes that then ends up being useful, which of course, is partially what I've been trying to do at Deepmind."
Tackling big hard problems and as one of their experts said: "I can tell you, if you are at the forefront of science, you will fail a great deal." But when it works, it really works. Power law again.
They started using the technology to win in video games, the complicated board game Go and even Alphafold, to figure out protein folding which could literally lead to life saving science. “These are gifts to humanity. Every single biological and chemistry achievement will be related to Alphafold in some way. Alphafold was an index moment. A moment people will not forget because the world changed.”
Demi’s learning from this: "The lesson that I learned is that ambition is a good thing, but you need to get the timing right. There is no point being 50 years ahead of your time. You will never survive 50 years of that kind of endeavor before it yields something. You'll literally die trying."
The race to AGI is on. "The advent of AGI will divide human history into two parts. The part up to that point and the part after that point. It will give us a tool that will allow us to completely reinvent our civilization" Exciting times.
As Demi says: “Everybody’s realized what Shane and I have known for more than 20 years, that AI is going to be the most important thing humanity’s ever going to invent. The pace of innovation and capabilities is accelerating, like a boulder rolling down a hill that we’ve kicked off and now it’s continuing to gather speed. AGI is on the horizon.”
So if you want to learn and be inspired by this exciting technology I highly recommend watching the documentary. It’s really worthwhile.