Yafan Wang’s Reviews > The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence > Status Update

Chapter 4 the Gang of three
He’s in the Gatsby Lab founded by Hinton. Shane Legg is in lab too. New Zealand, did some data science and worked for Goertzel. Mustafa Suleyman has an even crazier story of homeless since 15, confronting Muslim upbringing and dropping out of Oxford. Knew demis through his brother and got an landing after following up a gambling celebration’s conversation by noting Sergey Brian wuhuu

Chpt 3 the Jedi
He founded his first company Elixir and dreamed bigger than capacity. He seemed to be a charismatic Jedi and slave driver despite himself hating to be controlled. Pretty impressive that he can still sell so effusively after the hardware problem at the conference though. Now both Silver and Him is taking a break by doing PhD oh houuu

Chapter 2 Deep philosophical questions
Hassabis was in college, Cambridge. Sounded like he had some fun. Met David silver and John Daugman his prof, reinforced his commitment on AI.
Went to work for Molyneux again on Black and White, game with reinforcement learning. He updated his perception of Molyneux is pretty manipulative and volatile. Now on his way to start a company which was not a common path

Chapter 1 Destiny: So genius is a genius since born. Hassabis was alr playing chess at 5, understanding tree search at 10+ and working at video game company Bullfrog since 15 building metaverse like theme park.
His family upbringing is pretty interesting. His mom is Singaporean! His dad is an “idealist” mounting pressure on him to play chess, which shapes his “try your best to the point of death” ideology