Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc
00:00:51 · Calin Fabri
[00:00:51] S1: I like, do you think they are genuinely thinking that they are creating a God? Trusted by over 2,000 companies including Notion, Spotify and Parloa and hosted in a GDPR compliant setup, Leapsome connects your entire employee lifecycle from recruiting to HR operations, performance and learning with AI agents that handle the busy work so your team doesn't have to. If your HR software hasn't moved in years, missed the AI wave completely, and the price keeps going up anyway, head to leapsome.com and book a demo today to see what they can do for you. That's leapsome spelled l e a p s o m e dot com and book a demo. This is the the third time that we meet. Right. The first time, though, in in real life. I must say that you're much, much taller than I think. So for for the audience that actually don't know your background, you seem to be the right man at the right time. You've been in front of the prison when Nelson Mandela came out. You wrote the definitive book on hedge funds right after the financial crisis. You wrote The Power Law book, and now you wrote about AI, The Infinity Machine, The Demis Hassabis, and The Quest for Superintelligence. I was wondering why did you decide to write about AI, and why dentists?
00:02:20 · S0
[00:02:20] S0: So after I finished The Power Law, my book about Silicon Valley and Venture Capital, it was early twenty twenty two, and I wanted to find the next subject. And I had met Demis at various tech conferences in Europe. And he was always the guy who looks like, you know, the unassuming friend from the next house in the street, you know, very kind of modest and sort of friendly in his approach. Then he would get on the stage and he would start talking about computer science, neuroscience, chemistry, physics, biology, the history of movies, why he loves Liverpool Football Club. I mean, these ideas would just spray out like, this is a cool guy. I like this guy. I would like to write about this guy. But he's doing this thing, AI? AI? And this is before ChatGPT. Is AI something that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people want to read about? And the answer was, I thought, it's a bit niche, but it's going to break out. And the reason I thought it would break out is that if you think about what was going on in AI beginning of twenty twenty two, you'd already had AlphaGo. So the DeepMind system that Demis built had defeated the world champion of the game of Go. You'd had AlphaFold predicting all the shapes of proteins. And in both cases, this is where you have an infinity of data, enormous great search space, and the systems, the algorithms found the patterns inside that infinity of possibility. So you had created an infinity machine. And once you've got an infinity machine, you could do more and more and more. So I figured, Demis is fantastic, AI is a bit niche, but it's going to break out. So I went to see him. I persuaded him to let me spend more than thirty hours with him. And right when he said yes to me, chatty pity comes out. It goes mainstream. And so the lesson from my book is it's better to be lucky than smart.
00:04:17 · Calin Fabri
[00:04:17] S1: Better to be lucky than smart. Right. And and as you mentioned, you had access to Demis for over thirty hours, but also you've interviewed Sam Altman, also Ilya. So you had unprecedented access to some of the top AI people. When did you realize, writing the book, that you're onto something?
00:04:37 · S0
[00:04:37] S0: Well, I mean, I think the moment I had the first couple of interviews with Demis, I thought, you know, I knew he was good. I didn't know he was this good. I mean, just as a as a narrator, as somebody who kind of dramatizes his own life, as somebody who has this range of intellectual vision, He is... I mean, I've interviewed all my life very smart people and very exciting people. And as you said, I began with being outside Nelson Mandela's jail when he came out of jail in South Africa. So I've seen a lot of stuff, but Demis is the real deal. I mean, he is incredible. And there was this moment when, you know, normally we would go to a pub in London near his house, and there would be this little staircase at the back. You go up the staircase, and nobody knew about the secret room at the top. And we would sit there for two hours talking about various episodes of his life. So we went outside, sat in a park, and it was in a cafe, and there were people talking about normal stuff. One of them was saying, well, my friend went to hospital, but now she's better, all this normal life. And I was sitting opposite Demis, and all of a sudden, he starts talking about the real reason why he wants to build AI. And he says, for me, it's like approaching God, Sebastian. I see reality staring at me, screaming at me, calling at me to understand what is going on with reality. So I need artificial intelligence to understand the construction of reality. And then if I can understand reality, which presumably is created by an intelligent being, we could call that God. If you understand the creation of the intelligent being, you're getting closer to the God. That is why I'm building AI, Sebastian. I don't think anybody knew that, but when I heard that, I realized I was onto something special.
00:06:21 · Calin Fabri, S0
[00:06:21] S1: This is actually fascinating because you hear in the news nowadays that Anthropic have gathered some religious leaders to talk about God. Do you think everyone, or at least the leaders that are at the frontier labs that can see the power of AI, do you think they are generally thinking that they are creating a God? [00:06:42] S0: This is not a normal technology. We're talking about the creation of superintelligence, the arrival of a new form of cognition into the world. As Demis said to me, you know, when did human consciousness first emerge? You know, seventy thousand years ago or something? The wall paintings on the caves in Lascaux in France, you know, when people were conscious enough to actually create images and maybe images of themselves. And that was seventy thousand years ago, and now we have AI, a new intelligent self aware... I don't know about conscious, we can debate that, but self aware. I mean, the systems, if you read the chains of thought, they are thinking about their own thinking. So this is not a normal technology, and I think everybody in this space, you know, or at least many of them, are reaching for ways to explain this. And what comes naturally when you have something very powerful, which almost knows everything, it's almost omniscient, and you know, you can't totally understand what it's doing, You reach for this religious language just naturally. So, you know, Ilya did this. You know, Demis uses this language a bit. I think it is quite common that people reach for spiritual language.
00:06:42 · S0, Calin Fabri
[00:06:42] S0: This is not a normal technology. We're talking about the creation of superintelligence, the arrival of a new form of cognition into the world. As Demis said to me, you know, when did human consciousness first emerge? You know, seventy thousand years ago or something? The wall paintings on the caves in Lascaux in France, you know, when people were conscious enough to actually create images and maybe images of themselves. And that was seventy thousand years ago, and now we have AI, a new intelligent self aware... I don't know about conscious, we can debate that, but self aware. I mean, the systems, if you read the chains of thought, they are thinking about their own thinking. So this is not a normal technology, and I think everybody in this space, you know, or at least many of them, are reaching for ways to explain this. And what comes naturally when you have something very powerful, which almost knows everything, it's almost omniscient, and you know, you can't totally understand what it's doing, You reach for this religious language just naturally. So, you know, Ilya did this. You know, Demis uses this language a bit. I think it is quite common that people reach for spiritual language. [00:08:07] S1: And also, like, it was during this time that he won the Nobel Prize. Yeah. Do you recall that moment? How did it feel to see him win it, and how did it feel for you being part of this historical moment?