Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis wanted to keep AI in the lab longer: Here’s why

The release of ChatGPT in 2022 changed the world as we knew. While the public and critics viewed the release of ChatGPT as the next major revolution in humanity’s intelligence, the tech firms saw it as the call for a new race – a race where the biggest tech firms would compete to keep their AI models more intelligent than the competition’s. For Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, it was a moment that fundamentally shifted his lifelong mission.

After founding DeepMind to “solve intelligence and use it to solve everything else,” Hassabis suddenly found himself steering a “ferocious, consumer-facing commercial race.”