GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
About a week into the Musk v. Altman trial, we’ve heard from some of the most powerful people in tech — including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Elon Musk’s fixer Jared Birchall, and Musk himself. But one of the most prominent characters is hovering around the margins: Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.
Hassabis is the architect of Google’s in-house AI lab. He founded DeepMind as an independent startup in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, reportedly for between $400-650 million. Since then, he’s been at the helm of many of Google’s largest AI research breakthroughs, like AlphaFold — and he’s climbed the ladder from there, now leading Google Gemini, the team formerly known as Google Brain, and even for-profit DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs.
From the start, OpenAI was designed to oppose Google. Musk testified that he was inspired to found it by a conversation with Google’s Larry Page, where Page — in his telling — shrugged at the notion of AI wiping out humanity. It’s not surprising Musk and Altman’s circle would be wary of its AI team. But court documents and testimony reveal just how much Google and Hassabis specifically struck fear into their hearts.
During Brockman’s testimony this week, he said Musk talked about Hassabis “many, many times” throughout the early years of OpenAI, calling Musk “very consistent and fixated” on the man. When he attended an AI-focused dinner with Altman and Musk, Brockman added, the first thing he recalled Musk asking was, “Is Demis Hassabis evil?”
Musk was “fixated” on Hassabis, said Greg Brockman on the stand
A dinner with Demis before OpenAI’s founding was “extremely alarming,” Musk wrote in one email to Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, a fellow OpenAI co-founder. “I feel like they are playing the Super Bowl and we are playing the Puppy Bowl. Unless we want to have our ass handed to us, we need to step up our game dramatically,” he said in 2016.
Hassabis makes one of his first appearances in court documents soon after OpenAI’s founding, as Musk was talking up the new lab’s “open” nature in the press. In January of 2016, Musk forwarded Altman and Sutskever, who was poached from Google, a message Hassabis had sent him. The Google head disagreed with Musk and his cofounders “extolling the virtues of open sourcing AI.” Hassabis wrote that it was “actually very dangerous,” adding, “I presume you realise that this is not some sort of panacea that will somehow magically solve the AI problem?” A handful of months later, OpenAI co-founder (and current company president) Greg Brockman told Musk that Google’s “policy people” wanted to speak to him, for fear OpenAI would “build a public narrative that it’s wrong to have any closed-source AI.” Musk was especially interested in who, specifically, called Brockman from Google.
It was the start of years of competition, and the stakes would only rise from there.
About six months later, Musk started to relay his concerns about beating Google DeepMind in the AI race. He wrote to his Neuralink associates, “Deepmind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as a non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.”
... continue reading