What Did Scientists Think of DeepMind in 2010?

David Senra, reading Sebastian Mallaby, says founding a company to build AGI in 2010 was viewed as ridiculous and laughable. Fellow scientists rolled their eyes when DeepMind was founded in 2010, believing the construction of human-like AI to be impossible. Almost every potential investor turned them away. Demis Hassabis still scrapped together funding and persuaded gifted researchers to join him on the strength of an exhilarating vision: use AI to solve every single scientific problem that plagues humanity.

The optimistic vision of AI discovery has history in its corner. Past innovations from gunpowder to nuclear fission have made wars more terrifying and accidents more lethal. The general effect of technological change has been to amplify experiences and extend lifespans. Creating new technologies is intrinsic to being human.

In 2016, DeepMind solved a grand challenge in computer science, creating a system that surpassed the intuitive brilliance of the world's best players of the ancient board game Go. A YouTube documentary about Demis Hassabis and DeepMind is called The Thinking Game. In 2020, DeepMind solved a second grand challenge in biochemistry, stitching together 32 algorithms to define the shape of nearly all the proteins in nature. In 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for protein structure prediction.