documentary AlphaGo Reflects one of the most important moments in the history of artificial intelligence, when an AI defeated a human at the ancient Chinese game Go.Now, the same award-winning documentary team has a new film that explores the lab behind that breakthrough and its co-founder Demis Hassabis, who has spent his entire life trying to “unravel intelligence.”
thinking game tells the story of deepmindHassabis and his discovery of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
I discussed the documentary with Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute Episode 183 of Artificial Intelligence ShowHe believes it is essential to see where this technology is going for anyone trying to understand it,
“It’s great,” Roetzer says.
the man who wants to solve everything
The film focuses on the Hassabis and their extraordinary discovery of AGI.
For years, Roetzer has used Hassabis’s definition of AI, “the science of making machines smarter,” in his keynote speeches. Yet, when he polls the audience about who Hassabis is, very few people know him.
“And he’s going to win multiple Nobel Prizes,” Roetzer says. “He might be the most influential person of our generation. And nobody knows that person.”
thinking game It shows how Hassabis’s early life shaped a unique, decades-long mission: to solve intelligence, and then use that intelligence to solve everything else.
prioritizing time over money
One of the most revealing moments in the documentary involves the sale of DeepMind to Google in 2014 for approximately $650 million.
In today’s valuation context, where startups like Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence can raise billions of dollars without a product, that price seems surprisingly low. The film reveals that early investors, possibly including Peter Thiel, did not want to sell.
So why did the Hassabis do this?
Not for money. He wanted support to accelerate his timeline.
Hassabis calculated that access to Google’s infrastructure would speed up his timeline by five years. For them, preserving five years of their own cognitive peak was more valuable than waiting for more money.
“There’s no time to waste,” says Roetzer.
pure scientist
The documentary also captures the moment when DeepMind cracked the code on protein folding with AlphaFold, a breakthrough that essentially solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology.
In the film, the team realizes that they have solved a potentially trillion-dollar problem. When asked what to do with it, the Hassabis do not hesitate to make their models available to the public or open the sources.
“He literally gave humanity these predictive models for protein folding that potentially advanced medicine by decades,” Roetzer says.
watch it
Even among the key leaders shaping the future of AI, from Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk, Hassabis is at the forefront.
He represents a different kind of ambition. He is not motivated by money; He is driven to find ways for AI to truly benefit society.
“If you think about the people who are leading this charge, who do I really want controlling it?” Roetzer asks. “For me, I want the pure scientist who is doing this because he believes intelligence solves everything else.”
thinking game Available to watch for free on youtube,
