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.”<br>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. The 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.”<br>AI@GSB, the Dean&#x27;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.<br>See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

An AI@GSB Special: Demis Hassabis Thinks We’re in the ‘Foothills of the Singularity’

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# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** View From The Top

## Participants

- **Jennifer Auker** (Stanford GSB)
- **Michael McDowell** (Stanford GSB)
- **Jonathan Levin** (Stanford University)
- **Demis Hassabis** (Google DeepMind)
- **Aaron** (None)
- **Miki** (None)
- **Janai** (None)

## Transcript

Hi everyone, I'm Jennifer Auker, the General Atlantic Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. And I'm Michael McDowell, a producer here at the GSB. And today we're live from the GSB. That's right. You're about to hear a conversation between my friend and colleague, John Levin, President of Stanford University, and Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind.

Jennifer, I think it's fair to say that you made this conversation happen. So tell me why you invited Demis to the GSB. So many reasons. But honestly, the thing that drew me the most isn't AI itself, it's Demis. Before DeepMind, before AlphaGo, his dissertation explored the neurological relationship between memory and imagination.

He showed that patients with hippocampal damage lost not only the ability to recall the past, but to construct any rich mental scene moving forward. To imagine, you have to have lived. This was a big breakthrough back in 2007, and it raises a pretty profound question given what Demis went on to build.

It really does. If AI increasingly handles planning, remembering, scenario building, what happens to human imagination? What capacities do we most want to preserve, deepen, and expand? Yeah, it's not just what we might lose, but what becomes possible.

Absolutely. I'm thinking about scientific advancement, economic empowerment, creative potential, expanded agency, and ultimately fuller human lives. At the micro level, I think of this as flourishing, which means feeling fully alive, creative, connected, and purposeful.

And if we're able to accomplish that, really exciting things start to happen at the macro level across organizations, communities, and society. I keep thinking about something Demis said, which you're all about to hear, which is that the future is still unwritten. None of this is inevitable.

I think Demis is asking many of the same questions I am, and understands maybe better than anyone, how the choices we make now may alter not only our future, but the nature of human existence. And that's why I was so excited to bring him here to Stanford, the place where big ideas meet real application. On that note, thank you so much, Jennifer. Thank you, Michael. Here's Demis Hassabis in conversation with Jonathan Levin.

Demis, it's great to have you here at Stanford. It's fantastic to be here. Thanks, everyone, for coming. Really appreciate you doing this. So I'm going to ask you some questions. We'll have some questions from students. And we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Maybe we would say you've been chronicled a lot recently, a movie, a book. So many people have heard about your trajectory. It is quite remarkable.

Chess prodigy, ...

An AI@GSB Special: Demis Hassabis Thinks We’re in the ‘Foothills of the Singularity’

Transcript

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An AI@GSB Special: Demis Hassabis Thinks We’re in the ‘Foothills of the Singularity’

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.