Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said artificial intelligence is entering a period unlike previous technological shifts, calling it a \u201cspecies-level transition\u201d that leaves humanity with \u201clittle margin for error\u201d over the next decade.<\/p>\n
During his talk with University President Jonathan Levin \u201994 at the Graduate School of Business (GSB) last Friday, Hassabis said AI is currently in the \u201cfoothills of the singularity,\u201d with technology is advancing about 10 times faster than the Industrial Revolution, and argued for increasing international coordination on AI regulation within the next five to 10 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hassabis, the 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry compared AI to global precedents for nuclear weapons and climate change. He said the public is \u201cright to be concerned\u201d about AI safety, disagreeing with industry voices who call the risks overblown. Hassabis described the dual-use nature of frontier models, as they could cure diseases, address climate change or unlock fusion energy, but could also be weaponized to design pathogens or launch cyberattacks.<\/p>\n
Hassabis also discussed open-source AI, asking proponents how they plan to deal with the \u201cbad actor problem.\u201d Hassabis said that he supported \u201csmart, targeted\u201d regulatory approaches instead of static rules that will struggle to keep pace with these risks \u2014 including period independent evaluations of model capabilities, alongside existing sector regulations for AI implemented in driving, medicine and other areas.<\/p>\n
Hassabis said people should not confuse today\u2019s \u201cquite static\u201d question-and-answer chatbots with future iterations, which he expects to progress quickly once feedback loops tighten. Hassabis said that he believes the next era will involve autonomous agents that can string together plans and take real-world actions, like booking a weeklong vacation across 20 websites or executing a drug-development research program.<\/p>\n
Hassabis also discussed DeepMind\u2019s business practices. He defended DeepMind\u2019s decision to freely release the predictions of AlphaFold, an AI model that predicted nearly every known protein structure (Hassabis won a Nobel Prize for the model). When Levin asked why the company did not commercialize the tool, Hassabis said the choice matched DeepMind\u2019s mission and the field\u2019s 50-year history of openly sharing crystallography data in the Protein Data Bank.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe stood on the shoulders of giants,\u201d Hassabis said, adding that the tool would have taken 10,000 Ph.D.s to produce by hand. He believes the \u201cfundamental science layer\u201d shouldn\u2019t be commercialized so it can maximize global scientific benefits. The real commercial opportunity is downstream in drug discovery, he said.<\/p>\n
Hassabis connected his current work with other parts of his career. He said that his stint in chess taught him to break ambitious problems into discrete steps, and his time in the video game industry taught him to combine engineering with creativity at scale. Ultimately, Hassabis said his mission is to use artificial general intelligence (AGI) as the \u201cultimate tool for science.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hassabis also described the evolution of DeepMind, which included early struggles with reinforcement learning \u2014 there were months when their system couldn\u2019t win a single game of Pong, he said. The ultimate breakthrough was a deep reinforcement learning agent that learned to play directly from raw pixels, which became the foundation for AlphaGo, one of the most prolific goal models. Hassabis called this event \u201cthe start of the modern AI era.\u201d Still, DeepMind\u2019s plan remains relatively constant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cStep one: solve intelligence. Step two: use it to solve everything else,\u201d Hassabis said.<\/p>\n
The conversation took place as part of the AI@GSB series, in partnership with the School of Medicine. GSB dean Sarah Soule introduced Hassabis. Soule highlighted the University\u2019s cross-disciplinary ambitions with AI and discussed the GSB\u2019s partnership with the Stanford School of Medicine to reimagine cancer care.<\/p>\n
Hassabis said he hopes AI will cure disease, slow aging and crack open the mysteries of Alzheimer\u2019s. However, he believes certain domains should remain strictly human. He said he has no desire for an AI friend, and that empathy, mentorship and the \u201cinspiration part\u201d of teaching are uniquely human work. Hassabis noted that while an AI tutor might get a student \u201c80% there in terms of knowledge,\u201d but it cannot replace the human element.<\/p>\n
Hassabis ended the talk by focusing on human agency. \u201cHumans should always maintain their sense of meaning and what they decide to focus their lives on,\u201d he said. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t become this kind of passive recipient of the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
Students attending the talk reflected on their understanding of AI and Hassabis\u2019s points.<\/p>\n
Andrea Knoepffler \u201926 said, \u201cWe don\u2019t necessarily want AI to kind of replace what being a human means. Instead, it should augment human intelligence.\u201d Gia Ancone \u201926 enjoyed the event as it \u201cright up her alley\u201d because of her interest in the intersection of health and AI, calling it a \u201creally great talk.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said artificial intelligence is entering a period unlike previous technological shifts,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,32163,309,955,6839,5044,1374,11794,711,132,7543,6955,32164,26032,359,32165,14954,32166,164,1944,134,3607],"class_list":["post-54894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intellignece","tag-business","tag-chatbots","tag-climate-change","tag-deepmind","tag-disease","tag-drug","tag-future","tag-google","tag-google-deepmind","tag-graduate","tag-graduate-school-of-business","tag-industrial-revolution","tag-medicine","tag-nobel-laureate","tag-nobel-prize","tag-phd","tag-physics","tag-protein","tag-technology","tag-technology-and-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}