The Infinity Machine Quotes

“Safety isn't about governance structures," he went on, "I mean, if you have a governance board, it probably wouldn't do the right thing when it came to the crunch.  Same thing with a safety charter.  You can try to negotiate one.  But it's not realistic to create bright-line principles years in advance because you'll probably draw the lines in the wrong places.  So discussing these things didn't really help," Hassabis continued, "It made it harder to build useful trust, because when you negotiate a trustless structure, it implies you can't trust the other person." ”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“Hassabis had believed that all facets of intelligence come down to finding patterns in the infinity of noise.  Intuition amounted to a clever algorithm of some kind -- an algorithm that science could discover.”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“number of distinct parts”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“Who would've thought you can actually inspire people too much?" he reflected years later.  "Well, you can, because you can get to the point where you are deluding your team, and they are deluding you also.  It's like, I'm making the judgement this is possible because the engineers are telling me it's possible; but they're only telling me it's possible because I've over-inspired them," Hassibis said.  "So, in fact, none of us is getting real feedback.”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“if you fed an infinity of data about cells into an inductive computer, the machine might figure out a way of describing what was going on -- it would see the unseen patterns, the hidden laws, that explained cellular behavior. ”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“What the hell is going on here?” There was a pause”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it,” Oppenheimer said. “You argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“Molyneux gave Hassabis a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach, a fire hose of a book that has inspired a remarkable number of future AI scientists.”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence

“In the late 1990s, however, London venture capitalists hardly deserved the title. In Silicon Valley, T-shirted start-up founders raised millions from seasoned investors. In London, Hassabis felt obliged to don a stuffy suit, and the investors were more pickled than seasoned.”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“avarice,”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“Anyway,” he continued”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

“All of which meant that Hassabis’s strategic calculation was logical. So long as progress toward artificial general intelligence involved reinforcement learning”
― Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence