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welcome everyone um I am really excited to be doing this with sir Demis uh who

as you may know recently got his his Knighthood have you gone to be dobbed

yet by the by the king okay sometime sum that's still to come um well there is so

much that I want to talk about and it's really great that doing this here in

London where you grew up where you found a deep mind and where you are now CEO of

Google deep mind running Google's aort around the world so maybe let's start

with that so obviously it must be quite a weird experience for you having start

a deep mind in 2010 when to put it mildly AI was not obvious you know it

was not there were not International Summits on AI uh there were not

trillions of dollars pouring into it and now all those things are true so like

when you look back on the last I guess it's now 14 years since you started it

what's what's sort of been most surprising both about what has worked

and what hasn't well look I mean it's it's um you

know it's great to be here and thanks everyone for coming and it's great to be

here in the heart of London um thinking about these kinds of things and you're

right as when we started 15 years ago um virtually no one was talking about AI in

fact certainly no one in industry and even in Academia I remember uh Shane Le

and myself we were both postdocs at Gatsby at UCL at the time we couldn't

really tell our professor because he he would have just definitely at best

laughed us out the room at worst s thought we'd sold out you know and and

gone away from research and what we were trying to what I was trying to do was

show that Cutting Edge research could be done in in a company uh deep research uh

and also we felt that there were enough uh new ideas in AI

um that we could make very fast progress kind of like an Apollo program effort

really for for AI and I've been thinking about it for actually 15 at least 15 20

years even before that but I felt that around 2010 I could see um we had the

right ingredients so um you know deep learning well they're called Deep belief

networks actually Jeff Hinton and and and Co had just to sort of invented some
foundational papers in 2006 2007 but it hadn't been really wide adopted yet gpus

were becoming sort of widely available um and we had some understanding of

Neuroscience and how the brains algorithms worked um and bringing that

all together was what made us feel like you know really fast progress could be

made and what was your starting point back then because it wasn't as I mean

today there's lots of people not that many people because it's so expensive

but there's some people that like oh you know we're going to build an llm we're

going to raise you know but that wasn't on the table then what did you where did

you start yeah we were just trying to scrape together frankly you know our

first um seed round it was it was it was almost impossible um we you know I

didn't pay myself a salary for first couple of years things like that but we

we we knew you know this was our life's work and um certainly been my life's

work and um I felt that finally maybe the time had come so it was so exciting

to try and get that going and we managed to find enough people to just get the

get the seed round done and and actually just start making progress towards this

overall goal seem Monumental at the time we had a kind of 20year road map

everyone has a 20-year road map for a deep tech company but but the

interesting thing is usually the joke is like you know it stays 20 years away as

the years progress but actually um we're more or less on track unbelievably so

perhaps that's the most surprising thing is that all these um hypotheses we had I

guess came out to be true you know so certainly on the on the research side

and the algorithm side you know betting on learning and generality very early on

things like reinforcement learning and and deep learning obviously the core of

our very first work in our Atari work and we sort of invented the field of

deep reinforcement learning um was was turned out to be the right approach and

um and then we also knew that if it did work it would it should become the

biggest thing ever because you should be able to apply this kind of general

intelligence to almost any field you know any field of human endeavor um and

I think what's happened in the last couple of years is everyone else

everyone has sort of realized that now what we know we knew maybe 20 plus years

ago so a lot of people will have seen or heard about some of the stuff you demoed

last week at at Google IO but from your perspective like what were the

highlights what what what is AI capable of today well look we well I mean it was

a fantastic event and we we it was very exciting um for me the Highlight was

probably this thing called project Astra that we showed which is

our vision for what um I'm calling a kind of universal assistant or Universal

AI agent could be like and and how it could help in your everyday life and

that the main key thing about it is its multimodality so its ability to

understand all the different modalities we operate in as as human beings in the

context we're in so I think that was what's missing from the language agents

is they didn't understand the context the spatial context you were in and and

the environment you were in so they can be that that limits their usefulness in

the end and um we always had this vision of something that could understand the

world around you through vision you know eventually audio and all the other

senses as well um and that's why we built Gemini our large model to be um

series of models to be multimodal from the beginning able to cope with any kind

of input and eventually produce any kind of output and um and that's that's the I

think the vision that we have for maybe the next year or two of having truly

smart assistance which I think um you know will be a pretty big um Game

Changer yeah if you haven't seen the Astra demo video I do encourage you to

watch it I don't want to spoil it but there there's there's a bit right at the

end which I think shows that these systems shows the power of of actually

having a very long context on on the video side right that's right so the

long that was one of the Innovations we came out with with gani you know 1.5

series is is uh this million token long context actually we extended to 2

million tokens now and maybe we can go a lot further than that and that means uh

you you can now ingest you know all of War and Peace or you know even like an

hourong video and and then ask questions of the system about it and it can answer

back intelligently and that opens up whole new possibilities for you know as
an analysis tool or a sort of research assistant um but also for uh then with

Astra are streaming live video um obvious ly and then doing things like

remembering I think the thing you're referring to is like remembering

something that happened a long time ago ambiently in the video stream uh and it

could be you know super useful I think for you know an elderly person to

remember where their medicine is or you know where your car keys are or

something like that so I just think there we've H barely scratched the

surface of what I can imagine these things will be used for so one thing

that I think a lot of people would be interested to get your take on is you

know you already mentioned that you know over the next couple years we can expect

to have you know things like more powerful personal assistant you know

kind of artificial uh intelligent artificially intelligent assistants how

do you think about what are the big remaining sort of Unsolved challenges

that we might see progress in over the next couple of years yeah I mean it's

pretty clear to me and I've I've said this publicly a few times that that that

what's missing from the current systems so obviously multimodality memory these

are things that we're working on and making good progress but it's missing

like planning uh and actions and it has some form of reasoning but not really

what do planning mean in this context well sort of the ability to break down

you know the ability to achieve a goal that you might set a system so it has to

be able to act in the world take actions so like the more like the game agents we

we we're famous for we sort of build in the past I mean take like alphao you

know there's some objective that you give it as the user and then obviously

in games it's normally to win the game or to maximize the points um and then

it's got to you know if the if the objective is pretty complicated or

abstract it has to have the ability to break that down into a set of steps that

are achievable set of interim goals interim plans uh and then that to build

up overall into this uh uh bigger plan and that involves you know needing to do

things like you know maybe tree search over over a planning trajectory perhaps
imagine uh in in 3D in in your you know in the Mind's Eye like what might happen

in a certain scenario in order to evaluate it so implies a lot of extra

capabilities that um the current systems don't have uh and I think what we need

and I think the next big Advance will be combining the sorts of things we did in

planning for for for programs like alphago um with but instead of it just

being limited to a game environment obviously instead you you you you

connect that to you know all of language um and perhaps all of multimodal context

around you and that that model uh and then do planning over that I think

that's the next um you know the next big Advance we're going to see well this is

quite important isn't it because I think um clearly one of the reasons that uh

particularly large language and now multimodal models have got so good over

the last few years is just the enormous amounts of compute that are being

invested in training and and also an inference um and you know so some people

like to say you know scale is all you need but it sounds like from what you're

saying there actually there are some new ideas that won't just come from scaling

these I think that's right I I mean look I I I think scaling is definitely

required and these large models are going to be part of an overall solution

to say AGI so I think there's not much doubt there now there is the question is

is like is scaling enough um and it could be that some of these properties

that we're talking about might just emerge um but I find it hard like some

of these other things we're discussing like planning feel like slightly

different in kind computations so my guess is that there's still you know

maybe a small handful of breakthroughs still required to get us all the way to

human level a AI maybe that's a good segue into talking about a very

different sort of Paradigm of AI if you like from the large mod large multimodal

models which is AI for science which you know I think you know Google Deep Mind

probably has a uh you know a unique uh strength and so a couple weeks ago seems

like forever in AI it feels like in AI it's like every week there's like a a

generation of of progress but two two or three weeks ago You released Alpha fold

3 which for a lot of scientists that I know they describe was revolutionary can
you describe what it is for people that don't know biology yeah so I mean maybe

we start with Alpha fold 2 which was the program we released you know a few years

ago now which essentially um solved one of the grand challenges in biology right

50-year Grand Challenge you know called protein folding and essentially what it

is is a protein the work hes of biology everything in your body everything

depends in biology depends on proteins for for their function and um you know

proteins described by its Amino acid sequence so you can think of it roughly

as the genetic sequence for the protein and um the protein folding problem is

can you predict the 3D shape that that protein that sort of string of beads if

you like folds up into in the body um just from the genetic sequence the amino

acid sequence and um the reason that's important is the 3D Shape uh uh uh kind

of tells you a lot about the function that that protein does right in the in

the body so if you want to understand disease or you want to just design a

drug to Target something you need to understand the 3D Shape of the of the

protein and then usually that would you know in the past experimentally it's

been extraordinarily difficult to get that experimentally takes like five

years you know that the rule of thumb is one PhD student their entire PhD to do

warm structure and but there's there's you know 20,000 proteins in in the

humans and then there's 200 million known to science in all of nature so it

would just take forever to do it like that so we want a comp computational

solution to it and that's what Alpha fold 2 was and uh sort of essentially

solved that problem and then we spent a year folding all 200 million proteins so

that would have taken you know equivalent of like a billion years of um

you know PhD time which is incredible uh done in one year so that's I think the

power of computational methods and then Alpha fold 3 which we just released as

you said you know last couple of weeks takes that one step further now and

biology is is not a static system right it's a dynamic emerging uh system and so

you to really understand biology you want to understand the Dynamics so in

effect Alpha fold 2 was the static picture of a protein and then Alpha fold
3 now allows you to understand how proteins interact with other

biomolecules um so of course other proteins but also strands of DNA RNA and

also things like ligans you know um compound chemical compounds effectively

uh useful for like drug Discovery so it's sort of a another huge leap and

where we're going with this is eventually I would like to model an

entire virtual cell the workings of an entire virtual cell really accurately so

that one could do experiments in silico on the cell the virtual cell and that

would be informative of what would actually happen in the in the real lab

and so what do you want to do with this because I think everyone here will have

obviously heard of deep mine but they may be less familiar with ismor Labs

what what what is isomorphic and what's your plan right so we span out

isomorphic after Alpha fold 2 was done and the idea was is to the reason we

were interested in protein folding is eventually to um revolutionize the way

we design drugs and uh the first step is understanding the surface of the protein

The Next Step which isomorphic is doing is designing a drug compound that will

bind to the right part of the protein um and ideally not bind to anything else

because that would be a side effect right so you kind of want to minimize uh

uh the of Target binding and so isomorphic moving into well we're

improving Alpha all the time to make it more Dynamic but also um uh building

other modules like chemistry modules more going into biochemistry to to which

is a perfect I think also another perfect area for generative AI like to

design you know uh molecules that will bind into the right place so I think the

hope is that um well of course Alpha fall is being used for for millions of

things now fundamental biology and disease understanding and so on but also

especially uh revolutionizing you know drug design and Drug Discovery and

taking it down from years to maybe months I think what's particularly cool

apart from the sort of impact that it can have on you know kind of people's

lives one of the things from an AI perspective I really like about the

stuff that you that you and your team have done on in the science side is that

it does sort of show that AI isn't this monolithic thing it's not just this you
know large land range models one of the things that you put out I think earlier

this year maybe it was the very end of last year was this paper Alpha geometry

about solving problems from the international mathematical Olympiad

which if you are not familiar with extraordinarily difficult mathematical

problems and sort of people often talked about this as one of the problems that

would be like the last things before we got AGI but but Alpha geometry solves

basically to almost gold medal standard Geet problem yeah no it does and it um

obviously only the geometry problems is only around onethird of the IMO uh uh

usually for in an average Olympiad set of problems but but we're making

progress also on the non geometry side too so yeah I think that maths is

actually quite well suited to these sorts of systems um and exploring um you

know you almost can think of it as moves in a game right of like you know if you

if you convert a function into another function you do a mathematical operation

that's almost like making a move in a game and then you have to assess whether

the new uh state of the equation is is you know you're making progress towards

towards solving something um so I think there's just almost Limitless what we

can apply it to and um I think we will be able to be gold level soon at IMO um

and and then that can probably translate to other things like reasoning coding um

you often find in with these systems is if you if you build it to be better in a

certain direction that actually improve you can kind of Port that back into the

main system and improve that but you're you're right there's a lot more going on

than just um large uh language models and and I think for a long while yet the

specialized systems will be able to do very interesting things like Alpha

we AGI system level um but um for now I think

that with the next few years I think there's going to be um needs for both

yeah um the interesting thing is that the general system can call the

specialized system as so um there's this sort of hybrid notion that we're

investigating others too like that whether the general system learns to do

tool use and then can use these specialized systems um to improve you
know whatever that is its maths ability its coding ability or you know playing

things like chess yeah well I think that was one of the things I found cool about

that paper was that it combined a language model and a you know kind of

more traditional symbolic reasoning engine yeah well youve talked about

games a lot so let's talk about games so you were a you were a very serious chess

player um you then obviously very famously uh beat go um with alphao and

lots of people have seen the the documentary um I think less well known

although you know is is in the public domain is that Demis is also a champion

diplomacy player I don't know if you know what diplomacy is but it is a game

of alliances and betrayal uh it's very open-ended you there's no you know

there's no sort of like um it's not like chess where there's a limited number of

moves um and like slightly well hugely to my surprise that is also an area

where AI has made kind of a lot of progress so when you think about games

what what AI not yet able to win and how do you think about that um yeah I mean I

think we've got you know games have always been so that was part of the

founding thesis of Deep Mind was to to use games as uh as convenient testing

ground so I think that's the issue always actually with if you're starting

on a kind of very ambitious deep Tech uh company and maybe many of you in the in

the in the audience are working on deep tech companies um you have this sort of

enormous 20y year ambitious goal but you've got to be able to break that down

one of the key things is actually choosing the right interim Milestones to

prove to obviously your backers and investors that you're making progress

and your team but also your team and yourself that you're actually in the

right direction and I think we did that that's one thing we did well with deep

mind is pick the right kind of interim goals whether that's a tari game go or

you know protein folding and um games was always the thing I had in mind

partly because of my background obviously you know playing a lot of

games and using games and I also training my own mind on games I I guess

you could call it playing chess from you know very young age as very formative

for me um and I think that it has all the right attributes to test out your AI
algorithms on but I think we have got to the point in the last few years where AI

can pretty much play almost any game now to a very high standard and for us Alpha

zero was the Pinnacle of that which was a evolution of alphao but that could

play any two-player perfect information game of course there are you know other

challenges like Pok in diplomacy where there are other ISS things come into it

in diplomacy there's language in in uh poker there's hidden information but

even in those domains I think uh the current AI systems are getting pretty

good although it always surprises me that the language models are terrible

playing even a simple game of chess that's really annoy actually and needs

to be fixed and you know we're working on but it's it's interesting that it has

um that issue it's interesting what it says about the those kind of language

models right they they don't really have uh a board state

an active state that they can maintain certainly not implicitly so

it's interesting actually that they fail at that currently um you think that will

go away with scale because I did I remember reading that paper about AEL

which is a much simpler game and there is some evidence that it has some

representation of what's going on in a it does it does have some representation

but the hallucinations are especially bad in something as precise as a game so

if You' ever try to play chess against it then it will if you get it sort of

out of the normal uh openings so it's not pattern matching anymore um it

starts taking its own pieces and things like it just it just forgets where

things are so there's something clearly missing yeah I think it's quite

important actually probably what that's telling us so uh I think that's you know

going back to your earli question that's a big hole in in in in the capabilities

of our current systems I'm sure it'll get fixed but it suggests to me

something's missing not not just um not just scale um yeah you you touched on a

topic I wanted to dive into a bit which is uh which is entrepreneurship and

especially entrepreneurship in the UK I mean when you started deep mind uh there

were very few people actually starting uh companies in the UK relative to today
and certainly deep tech companies like like that um you ended up having to

raise a lot of your capital from outside the UK um what's your take on where the

UK is today as a entrepreneur well I I my feeling is it's it's it's you know

it's like night and day from from how it was back in 2010 it was hard to start

anything but especially I think it's really hard to start a deep tech company

um very very little understanding of that in the in the UK investment

community and you know and also appetite for some for funding something that

potentially would have that longer payoff um and uh even though obviously

the payoff would be enormous so I did end up going to the US to find actually

even there it wasn't really the VCS it was more individual entrepreneurs who

who had made it themselves and understood what a journey like that

would be like um that that were were were backing it but the one reason I

stayed in the UK was um I mean first you obviously I love it here growing up here

and but I do think we have enormous Talent here always have I mean I don't

know how many you know it's like three or four of the top univers top 10

universities in the world are in in the UK um and it's it's always been that way

and so we produce amazing talent um and then I used to think and then why was I

started a deep m in London was that you know if you didn't want to go back back

then if you didn't want to go and work for hedge funds and you say you had a

PhD in physics from Cambridge or something then there weren't that many

options and you wanted to stay in the UK so I felt there was a sort of you know

competitive Advantage by being here and actually um making the most of that

talent pool almost unopposed uh uh in the UK and actually for most of Europe

if you look at the the Big Technical University in Switzerland and Germany

and so on uh so it and it worked fantastically well for the first you

know five six seven years I would say then people caught on and now it's great

to see all of the multinationals have got their you know London bases here and

also all the VCS sort of I think stood up a notice so I like to think that deep

mine had a non-n negligible um part to play in that making putting you UK on

the map for deep Tech but also showing that it could be successful here there
was the talent base to the VC world and and hopefully that's made it a lot

easier for um companies that have followed uh uh since and we've got so

many strengths here in the UK in biotech and Finch Tech and other places where I

think Quantum where um you know we've got great University departments and

great talent and we just need to have that ambition and then I think there is

now um a much better funding environment yeah I mean we we first got to know each

other now quite a long time ago back in 2017 when our mutual friend Reed Hoffman

introduced us and you invested alongside Reed in entrepreneur first series a and

um you know I I two things I'd say on what you just said one it's amazing the

impact because no one had heard of deep mind because you were in stealth as well

weren't you I remember when when you sold to Google the impact that had on

particularly graduate students in unare University saying I don't actually

necessarily have to do this 10 20 30 year journey to you know being a

principal investigator in a lab I could actually start something and we saw an

explosion of AI startups around that time but also this point that um it

really was the case that near all the computer science grads that we met and

our job is to go into universities and find these people they wanted to go work

in Banks I mean that was you back in 2011 2012 and I do think that's changed

beyond recognition um you know something that we're both involved in uh is is

Arya the the advanced research and invention agency which Emily mentioned

in her introduction and you kindly joined the Advisory Board I'm the chair

of the board I think that is a great example of something where the UK is

actually sticking its you know hand up and saying wigg going to we're going to

go all in on not just you know being a you know a software Capital but actually

trying to do the the really hard stuff that's going to change the world how do

you think about that stuff yeah I think it's fantastic and I think it's amazing

what you've done with ef and and encouraging uh you know these these

technical Founders to to start things um I think AR is amazing too and actually

what the UK government is doing in general to to encourage science and and

Technology um including things like hosting the AI Summit

um safety Summits and and I know you of course you've been heavily involved

withan earlier as well um and just encouraging that technology base and I

really think that Britain needs to lean into that from uh from several

viewpoints really from an economic perspective to I think that's that's one

of our superpowers is that we have this really deep technical base and I think

Now's the Time to start deep technical companies um that that that that produce

really amazing new technologies um and we can build not just a company around

that but whole Industries around that and I think that's what we're seeing

with AI That's What We may see you know in the years to come in many other areas

too um and I think it's great great to see that us embracing that as a nation

um and it what it also means is that gives us more influence on the global

stage if you to to then influence um the societal impacts of this and how it will

go the ethics of it and so on and I think um if you're not at the Forefront

of the technology then you sort of lose your moral authority to lead and

influence in that way and be have a seat around the table and also you you'll be

blindsided by the advancers um the only way to not be blindsided is to to to be

at the Forefront or have advisers or or you know companies and things that and

universities that are at the Forefront that can then advise government um and I

think it's fantastic experiments like Arya to to pursue that even further and

in this case change Academia a bit too to be more forward thinking more

risk-taking uh more interdisciplinary um go more ambitious

um perhaps like you know the old daro IA ARA was I think that's what it was

modeled on right so um and course they had that line DARPA had that line in

their founding Mission which was to avoid and create technological surprise

and you know this point that if you're not if you're not doing the science

you're not going to know what's coming well I I I mean look I I always U

imagine an alternate universe where um timeline where you know Alan Ching as as

you know is one of my alltime heroes scientific Heroes but imagine instead of

persecuting him the government had unlocked all of the um you know the
the the the kind of Secrets um that were kind of way past their cell by day

frankly after the war with the Enigma machine lers we could have had Silicon

Valley in Manchester yeah right if if that's what it should have happened

should churing should have should have been at the head of some new you know

Mega startup I will say just as a side note um because you've already mentioned

the a safety Summits when I was uh co-leading the work on the preparation

for that last year I went to China and went to sort of do the Diplomatic work

with with them about them coming which they did do and you know honestly I

think one of the reasons that they were were so engaged is that their minister

of Science and Technology also had Alan churing as one of his Heroes and you

know we did this whole meeting in Mandarin in Translation and then he

broke into English to tell me that he'd been to Alan Ching's house and to the

Manchester industrial Museum so if that's not soft power I don't know what

I don't know what it is well exactly I mean look you know the UK I've always

said this about the UK obviously we've got world-class universities today you

know I hope Deep Mind and and has helped to stimulate an AI industry here and

what the work you know people like you have done with the funding environment

but we've also got an incredible Heritage with people like churing and

babage even before that and and and we've always been at the Forefront of

this kind of Technology information Theory so I think uh it's sort of you

know fitting that we're we you know we're helping to be in the Vanguard of

that so you as you mentioned there's now a lot of uh International interest in AI

just today I think you on a call with a group of world leaders for the second AI

safety Summit which the has been host hosted um in the Republic of Korea um

one thing that I've always admired uh about you and and your co-founder Shane

is that you've been very very consistent in how you've talked about AI safety for

long before uh you know anyone was talking

about a safety how do you think about it today yeah the reason we were thinking

that from the very Inception of of Deep Mind and even before and then we've
infused that into Google and and you know you can see we we our original sort

of Ethics Charter became you know was the first draft really for Google's AI

principles which you know were then became public uh several years ago um is

that we plan for Success so we had this mad you know crazy ambitious scheme uh

road map for how AGI could be reached then if we really believed that it was

possible in 20 years then we also knew that the impact that would have and

therefore it would need to be done very responsibly and with ethics and safety

at the Forefront of our minds at all times and I think that's um that's also

transpired you know with with the the way the Technology's gone and and the

impact it's already had which I think is just a fraction of what we're going to

see um and I of course I spent my whole life working on on AI because I believe

it I believe it's going to be the most beneficial technology ever invented but

only if we um apply it in the right way and build it in the right way and that

means the next you know 10 years let's say five 10 years is going to be very

critical what happens from here and I think it's what's great is I think it's

great that um maybe the the good part of this uh uh uh all the language models

BEC being super sort of mainstream is that um that the the governments have

sort of woken up to that and and I think that's useful um and and I've been

pleasantly surprised actually by their receptiveness but also their smartness

around getting their heads around both the opportunities and the challenges for

these Technologies and I think it's great that we are having that debate now

and with these Summits and you know you obviously helped organize the UK played

a major part help organize the UK one um it's it's good that we're doing that now

ahead of time of when these uh Things become extraordinary powerful in the

next few years yeah and I think one thing that uh you and I have talked

about in the past that you know personally I find really important to

emphasize is that um caring about this topic doesn't come from wanting to from

being anti-tech it comes from a position of uh you know really wanting to see

amazing Tech built and you know something that that I know we both agree

on is like the the way you deal with the risks of any technology not just AI um
isn't just about you know Banning things and regulating things it's also about

building building safety into what you do uh you've done a ton of that from the

beginning a deep mind um as you and I were discussing the other day I've just

started a program at EF dedicated to building defensive Technologies which I

think is uh the way I see kind of acceleration uh and safety going hand

inand what do you think's like missing what would you like to see people build

yeah I mean that's that's awesome that you're doing that so sort of emphasizing

the defensive capabilities I think it's great to try and make that asymmetric

would be would be amazing um I think we need a lot more research on benchmarking

and uh testing because um what we really want to be testing is when new

capabilities arrive and then evaluating if those are dangerous or not

capabilities I know there's something the UK safety Institute is is working on

and and and you know we're we're we're we're collaborating on um and many

others but there's a lot it's a very hard space in some ways coming up with

the right benchmarks is maybe even harder than coming up with the right

algorith Ms uh surprisingly um I think we need a lot more analysis tools uh

maybe analogous to Neuroscience analysis tools for for real brains to analyze

these virtual brains and um there's great work people you know folks like

anthropic do on on understanding the representations that that that are built

up in these neuron networks and we we do a lot of work on that as well with a lot

of computational neuroscientists on our team but that that needs accelerating um

I just think there's um and then beyond that we need to think about uh uh

building things like safe sandboxes that are um safe from cyber security

perspective from from outside breaking in but also the AI systems potentially

uh breaking out um and so we need to evaluate a lot of these things are

uncertain it may turn out that a lot of these things are much easier to deal

with than we we expected and that would be great um but some of them may be much

more challenging or much more risky than we know today so I think in in a

situation where there's a high degree of certainty then one must proceed with
cautious optimism in my view is is the correct way to proceed until you get

more evidence that's the scientific method that's that's the thoughtful and

I guess intentional way we've always tried to advance the frontier um it gets

hard when you're in the middle of a commercial you know uh frenzy like we

seem to be at the moment with AI but at the core of it you know we try and at

least for us we try to move um uh uh uh we try to be bold and responsible I

think is the way we call it rather than say moving fast and breaking things

which I think you know obviously is amazing for making the fastest progress

and that's the sort of Valley Mantra but I think is not appropriate for something

as transformative as powerful as as AI can potentially you know is potentially

going to be I think that something like the scientific method is a much more

suitable approach and the funny thing as we talk about is you probably couldn't

meet more two more techno Optimist than I I mean I'm unbelievably techno

Optimist in the sense of like I've always thought AI would be the ultimate

tool for science scientific discovery and thereby Advance

all of humanity and solve many many of the big Grand challenges that are facing

society and Humanity today from climate to disease to you know economic output

but um what I sort of maybe kind of find amusing about the the people who come to

this space a lot later maybe in the last year or so you know perhaps they were

doing crypto last year or something and then this year it's AI you know and

they're like you know accelerationists or whatever it is and and they don't

understand what what is amusing is they don't actually fully understand the

enormity of what's coming because if they did they would understand that

that's the I'm very optimistic we can get this right but only if we do it

carefully and take the time needed to do it and and don't rush you know headlong

blindly into it I think we got to treat it with the respect that the the

technology deserves and if we do that I have no doubt we'll we'll end you know

in 10 years time we'll be in in an amazing um you know flourishing Society

one minute left I want to ask you a completely different question uh

something uh again people might know about you not know about you is you are
a very Avid Reader you read a lot of things that had nothing to do with AI so

if you're going to recommend one non non air related book to the audience what

would it be oh wow um there's so many to choose from um look I I think my one of

my all-time favorite books on just the the the the it would be the fabric of

Reality by David Deutch I think that's the best book on trying to sort of

understand the nature of reality which ultimately is what I'd like to try and

do with AI um and then maybe one of the books that um that's that in the last

year I've read that I've enjoyed most is when we cease to understand the World by

labu his amazing writer it's unbelievable book one of the best

insights to like what genius is is yeah it's and scientific discovery and how

amazing it is but also you know what it's like to be at the frontiers of of

knowledge yeah fantastic well deis this has been great fun uh thank you for

being here and I think to wrap up the day we have Mark FR who leads strip in

the UK thanks [Applause]

great thank you so much that was wonderful thank you