The Thinking Game
Although artificial intelligence—or AI as it is now universally known—has exploded into public consciousness over the last two years, it has a long history, beginning with the early days of computing and has accelerated into concrete reality over the course of the nearly three decades since IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat Garry Kasparov, the world champion, in a six-game set. DeepMind, a leading AI lab owned by Google, followed in Deep Blue’s footsteps but with the intent of producing an intelligence that can perform beyond the specialist realm of challenges such as chess. In unravelling the mysteries of artificial general intelligence and unlocking its infinite possibilities, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis sees all the world’s problems as potentially solvable. Told from inside DeepMind’s London headquarters, the film chronicles the journey of Hassabis and his team as they relentlessly pursue an artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human abilities on a wide range of tasks.
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Sir Demis Hassabis has, at age 48, achieved more than most could hope to in a lifetime. As a child, he was an international-level chess prodigy before dropping that and becoming a world-class video game developer in his teens. At 17 he went to Cambridge to study computer science and in 2009 he obtained a PhD in neuroscience to help understand how the human brain could offer new ways to think about the development of what has been, as director Greg Kohs’ documentary shows, Hassabis’ lifelong obsession the creation of artificial general intelligence AGO. It’s his work in this field that has seen Hassabis win a knighthood, a Nobel prize in chemistry, and head the company DeepMind bought by Google in 2014 for £400m. As the film tracks the groundbreaking speed with which Hassabis and DeepMind have managed to solve previously insoluble problems in maths and science, even its subject is surprised by how fast the road to AGI is becoming a reality in his own lifetime. His warnings about the inevitable danger of crossing a threshold he grew up believing was possible but still far off in the future are worth taking note of.
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