Demis Hassabis founded a company to build the world’s most powerful AI. Then Google bought him out. Who is in charge?
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Judging by the titles of talks, the attendees at the conference tended towards the messianic: “The Mind and How to Build One”; “AI against Aging”; “Replacing Our Bodies”; “Modifying the Boundary between Life and Death”. Hassabis’s speech, by contrast, appeared underwhelming: “A Systems Neuroscience Approach to Building AGI”.
A logo appeared in the lower-right corner of his opening slide, a circular swirl of blue. Two words, closed up, were printed underneath it: DeepMind. This was the first time the company had been referred to in public. Hassabis had spent a year trying to get an invitation to the Singularity Summit. The lecture was an alibi. What he really needed was one minute with Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who funded the conference. Hassabis wanted Thiel’s investment.
Hassabis thought DeepMind would be a hybrid: it would have the drive of a startup, the brains of the greatest universities, and the deep pockets of one of the world’s most valuable companies. Every element was in place to hasten the arrival of AGI and solve the causes of human misery. First, Hassabis won the beginners’ tournament. Then he beat the winner of the experienced players, albeit with a handicap. Charles Matthews, the Cambridge Go master who ran the tournament, remembers the expert player’s shock at being thrashed by a 19-year-old novice. Matthews took Hassabis under his wing.
In 1998 he started a game studio of his own called Elixir. Hassabis focused on one hugely ambitious game, Republic: The Revolution, an intricate political simulation. Years earlier, when still in school, Hassabis had told his friend Mustafa Suleyman that the world needed grand simulations in order to model its complex dynamics and solve the toughest social problems. Now, he tried do so in a game.
Suleyman and Shane Legg, an AGI-obsessed New Zealander whom Hassabis also met at UCL, joined as co-founders. The firm’s reputation grew rapidly. Hassabis reeled in talent. “He’s a bit of a magnet,” says Ben Faulkner, DeepMind’s former operations manager. Many new recruits came from Europe, beyond the terrible gaze of Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook. Perhaps DeepMind’s greatest accomplishment was moving early to hire and retain the brightest and best.
Like Deep Blue in 1997, AlphaGo changed perceptions of human accomplishment. The human champions, some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, no longer stood at the pinnacle of intelligence. Nearly 20 years after he had confided his ambition to Fujuwarea, Hassabis fulfilled it. Hassabis has said that the match brought him close to tears. Traditionally, a student of Go pays back their teacher by beating them in a single contest. Hassabis thanked Matthews by beating the entire game.
The Review Agreement puts control of DeepMind’s core AGI technology, whenever it may be created, in the hands of a governing panel known as the Ethics Board. Far from being a cosmetic concession from Google, the Ethics Board gives DeepMind solid legal backing to keep control of its most valuable and potentially most dangerous technology, according to the same source.
The human champions, some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, no longer stood at the pinnacle of intelligence Five years after the acquisition by Google, the question of who controls DeepMind is coming to a crunch point. The firm’s founders and early employees are approaching earn-out, when they can leave with the financial compensation that they received from the acquisition . But a source close to the company suggests that Alphabet has pushed back the founders’ earn-outs by two years. Given his relentless focus, Hassabis is unlikely to jump ship.
Google’s annexation has angered employees at DeepMind Health. According to people close to the health team, more employees plan to leave the company once the absorption is complete. One member of the IRP, Mike Bracken, has already walked out on Suleyman. According to multiple people familiar with the event, Bracken quit in December 2017 over concerns that the panel was more about window-dressing than genuine oversight.
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