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first reaction. Telephone interview, October 2024
“When the best scientists put these kinds of tools together, they can do incredible things.”
Immediately after receiving the call from Stockholm, Demis Hassabis reflected on creating the right research environment and the interaction between AI and individual scientists.
interview record
Demis Hassabis: Hello, I’m Demis.
Adam Smith: Hello, Demis. This is Adam Smith from the Nobel Prize website.
DH: That’s great, I’m glad to hear from you.
AS: Congratulations!
DH: Thank you.
AS: You have so many accomplishments and accolades and are still young, what does this award mean to you?
DH: Yeah, it’s incredibly special and it’s really surreal to be honest. It hasn’t really hit me yet, but it’s an incredible honor. You know, it’s a really big one.
AS: What were your first thoughts when you heard you won the award?
DH: To be honest, I had no idea. My mind went blank. It was truly incredible. It’s just an incredible experience.
AS: I think the party is about to break out at Google DeepMind.
DH: I guess so, yes. I don’t think I ever thought about it, but I had a regular job waiting for me all day, and all those plans would probably have to change.
AS: Unfortunately, yes. But, actually, I’m happy to hear you say that. But AlphaFold, AlphaFold2, and now AlphaFold3 bring a whole new world to science. How do you see the relationship between these tools and individual scientists?
DH: The reason I’ve always worked on AI is because I’m passionate about science and knowledge discovery, and if we build AI the right way, it will be the ultimate tool to help humanity. Because I’ve always thought that it might be. Scientists, please help us explore the universe around us. We hope that AlphaFold will be the first example.
AS: But in terms of how, what this does to the individual, if you will, because the power is quite extraordinary, just amazing. But there are still individual scientists asking individual questions. So what is the interaction like?
DH: I think this will allow individual scientists to do even more, at least for the foreseeable future. Because these systems are tools. It is very suitable for analyzing data and finding patterns and structures within it. But you know, they can’t figure out the right question to ask, the right hypothesis, or the right guess. It all has to come from human scientists. I think the best scientists, combined with these kinds of tools, will be able to do incredible things, perhaps even with smaller teams than before. Because they can rely on tools to do a lot of work.
AS: Please tell me what the Google DeepMind environment is like.
DH: From the beginning, we tried to design it as the perfect environment to conduct cutting-edge research activities and bring together world experts from different fields. Of course, it’s not just machine learning and AI, but also engineering, physics, biology, and even philosophy. It brings it all together into an incredible melting pot that provides resources, computing resources, and more. Great things will come out of it. We’ve seen it in the past at places like Bell Labs, and I was inspired by the stories of the golden age of those kinds of places. I wanted to try making something like that myself.
AS: What a beautiful recreation of Bell Laboratories in King’s Cross. nice idea.
DH: Yes. that’s right.
AS: Last question. Is it totally okay that this is a private event, that this is Google DeepMind, that this is not a university? Is that wrong?
DH: I don’t think so. I feel that great science can be achieved anywhere as long as you approach it the right way and do basic research. As you know, many of these new sciences, new fields, new areas of research and discovery require a lot of resources. In our case, we have a lot of computers. That costs a lot of money, so why not tap into the private sector to fund these things? As long as we stay true to the scientific method, approach it with true scientific rigor, and pursue big questions, I feel like we’re doing that at Google Deep Mind.
AS: Thank you very much. It’s going to be a very exciting day so keep enjoying it.
DH: Thank you. Thank you for your time.
AS: Okay. thank you. Demis.
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MLA Style: Demis Hassabis – Interview. nobelprize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2024. December 18, 2024.
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