Demis Hassabis
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2017
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is Dr Demis Hassabis. An artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, he is also a neuroscientist, a computer games designer, an entrepreneur, and in his youth, a world-class chess player.
Born in 1976, he was introduced to chess aged four and, by the age of twelve, was the world's second-highest ranked player for his age. With his winnings, he bought himself a PC and taught himself to code. After taking his A Levels two years early, before going to university he worked on one of the most successful computer games of the 1990s, Theme Park. He graduated from Cambridge with a double first, and returned to the computer games industry, founding his own company in his early twenties.
His passion had long been artificial intelligence and he says everything he's done has been part of a long-term plan to "solve intelligence" and then use intelligence "to solve everything else". He gained a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience where he deliberately chose to study topics where AI had failed so far: memory and imagination. After stints at MIT and Harvard, he co-founded his company in 2010, which was then acquired by Google in January 2014. In March 2016 their computer programme, AlphaGo, beat a world champion Go player at the game having taught itself how to play through a combination of two techniques - deep learning and reinforcement learning.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:02.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. |
| 0:04.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:09.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast. |
| 0:13.0 | For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk- Radio 4. |
| 0:30.0 | Music |
| 0:42.0 | My castaway this week is the Artificial Intelligence Expert, Dema Susabis, |
| 0:47.0 | although to tie him to just one subject is to rather understate his achievements. |
| 0:51.0 | He's also a neuroscientist, computer games designer, entrepreneur and world-class chess player. |
| 0:58.0 | So what's he currently working on? |
| 1:00.0 | A potentially meta-solution to any problem. |
| 1:04.0 | Given his track record, it's clear he's A entirely serious and B probably up to the job. |
| 1:10.0 | A child prodigy, he won a place at Cambridge aged 16, |
| 1:14.0 | going on to graduate with a double first. |
| 1:17.0 | In his 30s, he and his partners sold their Artificial Intelligence company Deep Mind to Google for a reported £400 million. |
| 1:25.0 | He says, well, a lot of interesting things, but here's a flavour. |
| 1:29.0 | Trying to build an Artificial Mind is, I think, the best way of investigating some of the mysteries of our own minds. |
| 1:36.0 | Like what consciousness is, what dreams are for, what creativity is. |
| 1:41.0 | So welcome, Dema Susabis. |
| 1:43.0 | Dreams, creativity, consciousness. |
| 1:46.0 | They are really at the very core of what defines humanity. |
| 1:50.0 | It strikes me you're clearly not somebody who suffers from existential overwhelm. |
... |
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