How can AI help us understand and master deeply complex systems—from the game Go, which has 10 to the power 170 possible positions a player could pursue, or proteins, which, on average, can fold in 10 to the power 300 possible ways? This week, Reid and Aria are joined by Demis Hassabis. Demis is a British artificial intelligence researcher, co-founder, and CEO of the AI company, DeepMind. Under his leadership, DeepMind developed Alpha Go, the first AI to defeat a human world champion in Go and later created AlphaFold, which solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem. He's considered one of the most influential figures in AI. Demis, Reid, and Aria discuss game theory, medicine, multimodality, and the nature of innovation and creativity.

For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

Select mentions:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

AlphaGo documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

Nash equilibrium & US mathematician John Forbes Nash

Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga

Veo 2, an advanced, AI-powered video creation platform from Google DeepMind

The Culture series by Iain Banks

Hartmut Neven, German-American computer scientist

Topics:

3:11 - Hellos and intros

5:20 - Brute force vs. self-learning systems

8:24 - How a learning approach helped develop new AI systems

11:29 - AlphaGo’s Move 37

16:16 - What will the next Move 37 be?

19:42 - What makes an AI that can play the video game StarCraft impressive

22:32 - The importance of the act of play

26:24 - Data and synthetic data

28:33 - Midroll ad

28:39 - Is it important to have AI embedded in the world?

33:44 - The trade-off between thinking time and output quality

36:03 - Computer languages designed for AI

40:22 - The future of multimodality

43:27 - AI and geographic diversity

48:24 - AlphaFold and the future of medicine

51:18 - Rapid-fire Questions

Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Each episode seeks to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

Demis Hassabis on AI, game theory, multimodality, and the nature of creativity