The Future of Intelligence with Demis Hassabis (Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind)

“Well, look, it's probably my longest standing passion is world models and simulations in addition to AI. Of course, it's all coming together in our most recent work like genie. I think language models are able to understand a lot about the world. I think actually more than we expected, more than I expected, because language is actually probably richer than we thought. But there's still a lot about the spatial dynamics of the world, spatial awareness and the physical context we're in, and how that works mechanically that it's hard to describe in words and isn't generally described in corpuses of words.”

“Yeah. We've just announced partnership with a deep one. We already were collaborating with them, but it's a much deeper one now with Commonwealth Fusion who I think are probably the best startup working on at least traditional tokamak reactors. So they're probably closest to having something viable, and we want to help accelerate that, helping them contain the plasma in the magnets and maybe even some material design there as well.”

“So sometimes people call it jagged intelligences. So they're really good at certain things, maybe even like PhD level, but then other things, they're like not even high school level. So it's very uneven still the performances of these systems. They're very, very impressive in certain dimensions, but they're still pretty basic in others. And we've got to close those gaps.”

“At the moment, it's a little bit like the systems are just, it's like talking to a person and they just, when they're in a bad day, they're just literally telling you the first thing that comes to their mind. Most of the time, that will be okay, but then sometimes when it's a very difficult thing, you'd want to stop pause for a moment and maybe go over what you were about to say and adjust what you were about to say. But perhaps that's happening less and less in the world these days, but that's still the better way of having a discourse.”

“But then we thought, well, wouldn't it be fun if we plugged Genie into Simmer and sort of drop a Simmer agent into another AI that was creating the world on the fly? So now the two AIs are kind of interacting in the minds of each other. So the Simmer agent is trying to navigate this world, and Genie is, as far as Genie is concerned, that's just a player and an avatar doesn't care that it's another AI. So it's just generating the world around whatever Simmer is trying to do.”

“So we wouldn't want to go back to pre Industrial Revolution, but maybe we can figure out ahead of time by learning from it, what those dislocations were and maybe mitigate those earlier or more effectively this time. And we're probably going to have to, because the difference this time is that it's probably going to be 10 times bigger than Industrial Revolution, and it'll probably happen 10 times faster. So more like a decade, then unfold over a decade, then a century.”

“One example would be just seed rounds for startups. That basically haven't even got going yet. And they're raising at tens of billions of dollars, valuations just out of the gate. It's sort of interesting to see, can that be sustainable? You know, my guess is probably not, at least not in general.”

“And I'm working on in my spare time, my two minutes of spare time, you know, physics theories about things like information being the most fundamental unit, should we say, of the universe, not energy, not matter, but information. So it may be that these are all interchangeable in the end, but we just sense it. We feel it in a different way. But, you know, as far as we know, this is still all these amazing sensors that we have, they're still computable by a Turing machine.”

“The next stage is agent-based systems, which I think we're going to start seeing. We're seeing now, but they're pretty primitive. Like in the next couple of years, I think we'll start seeing some really impressive, reliable ones. And I think those will be incredibly useful and capable, if you think about them as an assistant or something like that, but also they'll be more autonomous. So I think the risks go up as well with those types of systems. So I'm quite worried about what those sorts of systems will be able to do, maybe in two, three years time.”