Not a boardroom negotiation, no call or a billion-dollar pitch but it was a walk around a rented castle in 2013 when Google co-founder Larry Page asked a question from Demis Hassbis, the co-founder of DeepMind that laid the foundation for Google DeepMind – one of the most advanced AI labs in the world. This is based on an exclusive excerpt from an upcoming book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence, by journalist Sebastian Mallaby wherein he has detailed on how Google acquired DeepMind in 2014.According to a report by Wall Street journal, in the summer of 2013, at a birthday party for Elon Musk – organised by his then-wife, actress Talulah Riley – at a rented castle in Tarrytown, New York, the future of AI was quietly decided during a stroll through the grounds.Musk was already an early investor in DeepMind, the AI company Hassabis had founded three years earlier when OpenAI or Anthropic did not exist. Hassabis had built DeepMind and staffed it by the brightest minds in the field, working toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Then Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, spotted Hassabis at the party and suggested they take a walk.
The question that changed everything
The two men wandered around the castle grounds with Page speaking in a strained whisper owing to a rare vocal cord condition. Why bother building an independent company at all? “Why don’t you take advantage of what I’ve already created?” Page asked. At that time, Google had acquired several smaller AI firms and was actively hunting for its next one.Page did not offer money but a mission that would consume Hassabis’ best years of his career. Hassabis’s real goal was to build AGI, and Google offered the resources, the infrastructure, and the computing power that it spent decades assembling. Hassabis, by his own account, found it hard to argue with.“He was basically telling me, maybe you could build a company like Google, but it would take the best part of your career. But if my real mission was to build AGI, then why don’t I use all the resources that he’s accumulated? I thought that was a pretty good argument,” Hassabis recalled.“I was fed up with scrambling around, trying to raise money for what I knew was the biggest thing of all time,” Hassabis added. His conclusion was blunt: “I’ll go to Google. I’ll get a s—load of computers and then I’ll solve intelligence.”Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a reported $500 million. Under Google’s ownership, DeepMind went on to produce some of the most celebrated breakthroughs in AI research, including AlphaGo, which defeated the world’s best Go player, and AlphaFold, which solved one of biology’s most enduring mysteries by predicting the structure of proteins.
