The Creativity Code: How AI is learning to write, paint and think

by Marcus du Sautoy

applying the language that has helped us to navigate the mysteries of the primes and replacing primes by symmetrical objects has revealed surprising new insights into the theory of symmetry.

Exploration is perhaps the most obvious path. First understand how we’ve come to the place we are now and then try to push the boundaries just a little bit further. This involves deep immersion in what we have created to date. Out of that deep understanding might emerge something never seen before. It is often important to impress on students that there isn’t very often some big bang that resounds with the act of creation. It is gradual. As Van Gogh wrote: ‘Great things are not done by impulse but by small things brought together.’

The company needed money but initially Hassabis just couldn’t raise any capital. Pitching on a platform that they were going to play games and solve intelligence did not sound serious to most investors. A few, however, did see the vision. Among those who put money in right at the outset were Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Thiel had never invested outside Silicon Valley and tried to persuade Hassabis to relocate to the West Coast. A born-and-bred Londoner, Hassabis held his ground, insisting that there was more untapped talent in London that could be exploited. Hassabis remembers a crazy conversation he had with Thiel’s lawyer. ‘Does London have law on IP?’ she asked innocently. ‘I think they thought we were coming from Timbuctoo!’ The founders had to give up a huge amount of stock to the investors, but they had their money to start trying to crack AI.

It was at this moment that Hassabis decided to sell the company to Google. ‘We weren’t planning to, but three years in, focused on fundraising, I had only ten per cent of my time for research,’ he explained in an interview in Wired at the time. ‘I realised that there’s maybe not enough time in one lifetime to both build a Google-sized company and solve AI.

Euclid’s ancient recipe gets to the heart of four key characteristics any algorithm should ideally possess: 1. It should consist of a precisely stated and unambiguous set of instructions. 2. The procedure should always finish, regardless of the numbers you insert. (It should not enter an infinite loop!) 3. It should give the answer for any values input into the algorithm. 4. Ideally it should be fast.

Humankind now produces in two days the same amount of data it took us from the dawn of civilisation until 2003 to generate.