Demis Hassabis and Sebastian Mallaby were on stage in SF today and here are the 9 best things they said:
1. "There is a 50% chance that OpenAI goes bankrupt in the next 18mos" -Mallaby
2. "Dario is the best of all the other lab leaders." -Demis
3. On Claude Mythos: "It's not really tenable for a private company to decide who gets access to the frontier of cyber defense tech. What happens when China can do this in 6-12mos?" -Mallaby
4. "Not all countries are pessimistic about AI. I was just in India for the AI Summit Modi had and they're quite optimistic there" -Demis
5. "The most exciting current prospect in AI is our work at Isomorphic Labs. AlphaFold is just one of the many problems we need to solve. We need 6 'AlphaFold' moments to compress the drug delivery timeline from 10yrs to a few months" -Demis
6. "I don't think of p(doom) as probabilities to throw out there. I just know it's non zero. Some people like Marc Andreesen and Yann LeCun think it's 0% and I think that's crazy" -Demis
7. On AGI: "I think of a post-scarcity world where on the bright side we will have an unbelievable amount of science but we will have to think of economic problems of sharing proceeds equitably. We will also have philosophical questions to answer and need great new philosophers" -Demis
8. On career advice: "Immerse yourself in AI tools. Everyone has access to tools 3-6 months behind frontier. Enormous opportunity lies in applying AI to unexplored areas." -Demis
9. On the future: "When I started building this technology, I pictured a future quite different from this. More like CERN researchers where we discuss ideas and help each other out and stress test each other's ideas. It's my job to help how I can to make sure we make more considered, more scientific, more rigorous and more thoughtful decisions and that will also involve social scientists and economists. I'm going to do all I can to try and influence the future in a note thoughtful manner. The decisions we make in the next 5-10 years are going to affect us for 1000s of years. But I remain very optimistic." -Demis