These are the voices one needs to listen to, like Hinton, Karpathy and Sutskever, as they built this tech and who genuinely want to use it for good. If you read only one book on AI, read this. You’ll get all the perspectives; the people, players, insights into the technology (not one thing but many), how businesses have to pivot, the sheer intensity and pace of development, the successes and failures. So it has been good to get a little bit of Heligoland time to think.
Hassabis is a polymath and brings philosophy and psychology to the AI table, as comfortable in quoting Kant and Spinoza, as Einstein and Feynman. This has allowed him to think big and invent tech that really does change the world. AlphaFold saved a billion years of research in protein structures, now free to the world. His work is now the beating heart of Google. Most of the people he works with are ‘doers’, having ducked out of formal education or academe. He himself missed entire years of school. Both of the other founders of DeepMind left University before finishing their Degrees. His experience in getting things done (or not) in the NHS is sobering, even after developing world class solution in retinal scans and cancer screening (Ch 11).
His background, like Hinton, was in neuroscience, which allowed him to see the limitations of the brain and human-only experience. This is why he has a single goal – AGI, the word ‘General’ matters, as he wants us to be able to solve problems and make life easier for all and so in reading this book, you’ll see that AI is not LLMs alone but comes in a range of flavours. For him, AI is as important as fire or language. It is a Copernican revolution of the mind, where we must recognise, just as we recognised that the earth is no longer the centre of the Universe, that we also are no longer the centre or standard for intelligence.
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