Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis on the long game of AI

A decade ago, Hassabis’s lifelong enduring love of play and AI led to AlphaGo beating the world’s deepest board game. The lessons still drive his work today.

[Photos: LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images; Google DeepMind/Unsplash]

In 1988, a London pre-teen with a penchant for programming and gaming wrote a version of the classic board game Othello—also known as Reversi—for his Amiga 500 home computer. Teaching a piece of software to play the game was an ambitious coding project for someone so young.

And with that, Demis Hassabis notched his first achievement in the field of artificial intelligence.

The Othello-playing app “beat my kid brother, who was only five at the time,” Hassabis remembers. “It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me, because I just thought, ‘Wow, it’s incredible that you can make a program that’s inanimate and it can go off and do something on your behalf.'”

That proved to be a fateful epiphany. More than two decades later, it led to him cofounding DeepMind, the AI startup that did much to push the technology forward, both before and after its acquisition by Google in 2014. In 2023, Google merged DeepMind with Google Brain, its other highly productive AI arm, and named Hassabis as CEO of the combined operation, Google DeepMind. The AI model he oversees, Gemini, is now at the heart of Google products used by billions of people.

Long before the fruits of DeepMind’s work were everywhere, the company was a research lab whose early focus was on training algorithms to play games. That didn’t just connect them back to Hassabis’s childhood Othello app. From the very dawn of AI, researchers have used gaming as a canvas for discovery. For example, back in 2019, I wrote about a 1960 TV special that documented IBM’s checkers-playing computer.

Games are so powerful as a research tool because they’re “a microcosm of something important in real life,” explains Hassabis. “And we get to practice it many times in an environment that’s serious, but not serious, in a sense.”

Last month marked the tenth anniversary of the capstone to that quest—a history-making moment not just for DeepMind, but the entire AI field. The 2,500-year-old Chinese board game Go had been considered, in Hassabis’s words, “the Mount Everest of game AI”—so deep and mystical in its mechanics that for years, computers struggled to play it even poorly, let alone well. But from March 9-15 2016, in a match held in Seoul, DeepMind’s AlphaGo software beat Lee Sedol, Go’s world champion, four games to one.

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