In this episode, I profile Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Demis's mission is to build AGI—artificial general intelligence—and use it to solve science's biggest mysteries. I do so through what I believe is the most comprehensive biography of him: The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby.

Mallaby spent 30 hours interviewing Demis and had more than 100 conversations with the people who know him best.

In this episode you'll learn:

• How a chess prodigy became one of the architects of modern AI.
• The inside stories involving Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Mustafa Suleyman, and others who shaped the AI race.
• Why Hassabis walked away from money multiple times to pursue science instead.
• How DeepMind went from mastering Atari games to creating AlphaGo and AlphaFold.
• Why Hassabis is motivated differently than Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei.
• How Google produced many of the breakthroughs behind today's AI revolution—yet still lost the consumer AI race to ChatGPT.

This episode is part of a series profiling the AI titans.

Enjoy!
Rob Kelly

My guest today is David Perlman.

David has a PhD in Neuroscience and Meditation, and he’s an expert in misinformation.

He’s got an unusual background observing leaders up close — from the Dalai Lama to Jack Dorsey.

And it was at Twitter, where David worked as a User Research Data Scientist, that he was shown the door after a controversial interview with Vice Media.

He shares that story.

His work has appeared in nine journals including The American Journal of Psychiatry, NeuroImage, and The Cyber Defense Review.

We talk about David’s contrarian view on Anthropic’s closely guarded Mythos model, what AI could mean for propaganda, misinformation, and future elections.

And why he thinks many people are wrong about climate change.

Special thanks to Jennifer Elliott for connecting me with David — you might remember Jennifer from Episode 10 (The Data Center Expert's Ride or Die Plan for When AI Turns.

Enjoy!

Thx,
Rob Kelly

Marty Pesis is co-founder and CEO of Troveo.

Troveo helps content and data owners license their video, audio, and text to top AI models like OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic – and AI Unicorn startups too..

Marty says he may have the largest AI data corpus in the space (it includes 8M hours of video, 4m+ hours of audio, and billions of words of text).

We open the interview with Marty’s very first AI data deal, a request so strange I had to stop him and make sure I was hearing it right.

We get into how Tesla cars are really training machines on wheels.

We talk about the future of data collection. Picture factories with workers wearing GoPros, wrist cameras, shoulder cameras, sensor gloves, and narrating what they’re doing so robots can learn.

We cover the pricing of of data including what type of content AI Modfels will pay $1,000 per hour for.

And the one library of content he’d want if he could have any.

He also shares what learned from Troveo investor Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, and MrBeast, who bought Marty’s last company.

And we end, as usual, on AI and families, including Marty’s view that because of AI, college is not even on his radar right now for his young kids.

Thx!
-Rob