Quote of the Day

The ultimate goal was to build AI and understand the mind, then use it to understand science. Step one, solve intelligence. Step two, solve everything else.

Demis Hassabis
Co‑Founder & Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet
October 21, 2026
Why AI’s deepest mind believes the world is about to change radically

Also:

For their pioneering work on AlphaFold, Hassabis and Jumper won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

…

As the CEO of Isomorphic, he isn’t satisfied by simple progress. When the DeepMind team entered a competition for predicting the shape of proteins, for example, he didn’t just want to win. He wanted to make the entire premise of the competition obsolete. He wanted to beat the game. He still does.

And he and his team did make the competition obsolete because:

In this one problem, Hassabis saw an opportunity to find solutions to a whole lot more, since predicting the shapes of proteins—“unbelievably exquisite things,” he calls them—held the promise of understanding diseases and curing them. When DeepMind’s AlphaFold system effectively solved this problem in 2020, it was AI’s most impressive feat yet. But it wasn’t enough to satisfy Hassabis. In a meeting to discuss what else they could do, his colleague John Jumper mentioned that they could predict the structures of millions and millions of proteins in a month, and—

“Why don’t we just do that?” Hassabis said. “We should just do that.”

So they did. Before long, they had predicted the structure of nearly all known proteins—more than 200 million in total—and released them to scientists free of charge.

Emphasis added.

He also has proposed a means of keeping AI safe:

This summer, he spent his nights agonizing over every word of a proposal for developing the technology responsibly. In his essay, Hassabis wrote that he considers AI miraculous (“we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think”) and so consequential that it’s more like fire or electricity than the internet. To make sure it doesn’t burn down civilization, he pitched an industry-funded body that would operate under federal oversight and test frontier models before they’re released. His plan was meant to be adaptable, updated in real time and ratcheted up if necessary, nimble enough to keep pace with the technology it’s trying to control.

Hmmm… Maybe. I could see that having potential to make the output of those who participated have safer products. But I think the more critical issue is how to make the products of nation states, who do not participate in such a body, safe.

As pointed out, we have essentially found a way to make sand think and there is a LOT of sand in the world. More than that, SpaceXAI and others plan to move beyond earth and build data centers in space. This changes the scale of the problem into something beyond anything we have ever faced before.

I suspect the only way to keep the world safe from rogue AIs is to create a more powerful AI to protect us. Which is also a scary thought.

In related news. My stepdaughter, soon to graduate from Cambridge with a PhD in computer science, just accepted a job offer from Google DeepMind in England.