Demis Hassabis Thinks We’re in the ‘Foothills of the Singularity’

When Demis Hassabis pitched DeepMind to a few venture capitalists back in 2010, the business plan was almost comically audacious. “Step one: Solve intelligence. Step two: Use it to solve everything else,” he recalls in a conversation at Stanford Graduate School of Business with Stanford University President Jonathan Levin. “And people were quite confused. But we really meant it.”

Sixteen years later, the “broad arcs” of that plan have gone “unbelievably well,” says Hassabis, a chess prodigy turned video game developer turned neuroscientist turned Nobel Prize-winning AI pioneer. Today he’s on a mission to create “the ultimate tool for science,” building on his decision to give away AlphaFold, the groundbreaking AI system that predicts the structures of proteins. “It was obviously the right thing to do,” he says.

The most powerful technology humanity may ever create is arriving in “the most ferocious competitive environment” in history layered atop geopolitical rivalry. Hassabis worries about a “race to the bottom” dynamic among top AI labs and calls for “smart regulation” that is “fleet-footed” enough to keep pace. The stakes are profound: Artificial general intelligence could have “10 times the impact of the Industrial Revolution… 10 times faster.”

That future, Hassabis says, is just around the corner: “Ten years from now, I think we’ll realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now.”

AI@GSB, the Dean’s Applied AI initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), and Stanford Medical School hosted a conversation with Demis Hassabis, Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, on the frontier of artificial intelligence and what it means for how we live, work, and flourish.