Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

They approached DeepMind’s most important investor even before the company was founded. In recent years, Legg had joined an annual gathering of futurists called the Singularity Summit. “The Singularity” is the (theoretical) moment when technology improves to the point where it can no longer be controlled by the human race. The founders of this tiny conference belonged to an eclectic group of fringe academics, entrepreneurs, and hangers-on who believed this moment was on the way. They were intent on exploring not only artificial intelligence but life-extension technologies and stem-cell research and other disparate strands of futurism. One of the founders was a self-educated philosopher and self-described artificial intelligence researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who had introduced Legg to the idea of superintelligence in the early 2000s when they were working with a New York–based start-up called Intelligensis. But Hassabis and Legg had their eyes on one of the other conference founders: Peter Thiel.