9 Notable Remarks from Demis Hassabis and Sebastian Mallaby on a San Francisco Stage

On a San Francisco stage, Demis Hassabis and Sebastian Mallaby exchanged views on the AI competitive landscape, life sciences, and a post-AGI society. The core focus went beyond the current model race, touching on industry restructuring and long-term civilizational change that AI will bring.

• Mallaby put the probability of OpenAI going bankrupt within the next 18 months at 50%.
• Among various lab leaders, Demis rated Dario as the most outstanding figure.
• On the issue of Claude access, he raised the question of whether it is truly sustainable for a private company's structure to determine access to frontier cyber-defense technology.
• Demis said not every country is pessimistic about AI, noting that India is quite optimistic about it.
• As the current project he's most excited about, he named Isomorphic Labs, stressing that about 6 more breakthroughs on the scale of AlphaFold are needed. He believes this could compress drug development timelines from 10 years down to a matter of months.
• On p(doom), he said it's not something you should reduce to a number, but drew the line that the risk is not zero.
• He said he does not agree with Marc Andreessen and Yann LeCun's view that the risk probability is 0%.
• He forecast that after AGI, alongside greater abundance, economic issues like how to fairly distribute the gains, as well as new philosophical questions, will become important.
• As career advice, he recommended deeply using AI tools. He said most people would do fine using tools that are 3-6 months behind the frontier, and that there is a huge opportunity to bring AI into areas where it hasn't been applied yet.
• He emphasized that decisions made over the next 5-10 years could affect the next several thousand years, so a more careful, scientific, and reflective decision-making structure is needed.

He concluded that the direction of technology development must ultimately lead to a broader collaborative structure that includes social scientists and economists as well, and that despite all this, he remains very optimistic about the future.