Hassabis - most important AI person on the planet

Just finished a big, fat book ‘The Infinity Machine’, about Demis Hassabis. Put aside any tropes you have about tech-bros… he’s smart, driven, humble, brilliant, Liverpool season ticket holder, indifferent to material things and obsessed with AI…. and has a Nobel Prize. Easily the single, most important man in AI in the UK, if not the world.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…