I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist with the New York Times.
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork. This week, social media companies keep losing in court. How will that reshape the internet? Then, the Infinity Machine author Sebastian Mallaby joins us to discuss his new book on Google DeepMind and Demis Hassabis' quest to build superintelligence. And finally, it's been a while. Let's catch up with ChatGPT.
Well, Kevin, while we were away, I was riveted by what was going on in the courtrooms in Los Angeles and New Mexico related to social media.
Yeah, it has been a big week for these social media product liability trials that have been going on now for some months. And we actually got some verdicts. We did. And in both cases, social media lost. In LA, a jury found that Meta and YouTube had been negligent in the way that they designed features that they said were harmful to this plaintiff. They have to pay $6 million combined to this plaintiff. And then in New Mexico, the jury said, 'We believe that Meta has violated the state's unfair practices act and has misled consumers about the safety of its products and has endangered children.' In that case, they are ordering Meta to pay $375 million.
Yeah. So, we've talked a little bit about this series of cases against the social media companies. You know, social media companies, they get sued all the time for all manner of different things. I think what caught our eye, and specifically your eye, was the sort of legal theory underlying these cases. So, talk a little bit about that and what makes this case different from other cases that have been brought against the social media companies.
Yeah, so I would say there are kind of two big reasons why these cases are super important. One is that these are what are called bellwether cases. Kevin, you ever heard of a bellwether case?
These are like cases that set precedent for other cases.
Yeah, exactly. These are the cases that, if successful, are going to open the floodgates for lots of other people to sue under the same theory. The second big reason that these cases are really important is that they appear to have opened up a crack in Section 230 of our Communications Decency Act here, which for 30 years has been essentially the foundation that the entire internet rests on.
It's also a dentist's favorite statute.
Yes. That's Section Tooth Hurty, if the joke wasn't landing for you. So yes, this is a super important... super glad you got that.
No, the really sad part was I was planning my own Section 230 joke because I just went to the dentist yesterday and now I didn't have any cavities.
Moving on. So, Section 230, Kevin, you may remember, is the law that says that in most cases these platforms cannot be held liable for what their users post. So if I went on Facebook and I defamed you, which is something I think about doing every day, you could sue me, but you couldn't sue Facebook.
This is what's been blocking my lawsuits against Facebook over your posts for years.
That's right. And back in the day, like 30 years ago, this was actually really important because there were these small internet forums that were starting up. Some of them got to be bigger size, you know, CompuServe, AOL, and inevitably somebody would be mean to another user and they would say, 'I'm not just suing you. I'm suing CompuServe. I'm suing AOL. I'm putting the whole system on trial.' And a couple of lawmakers got together and they said, 'This is going to destroy the entire internet. Like, we need for there to be forums and not have these platforms being held liable for all these things.' But fast forward to today, and Kevin, would you agree that maybe there are some harms that are taking place on the internet that do not consist entirely of people defaming one another on CompuServe?
Yeah. And so this is essentially the question that gets asked in this case, right? People say, 'Hey, it seems like we're a pretty long way away from 1996. I'm opening up TikTok. I'm opening up Snapchat and I'm seeing infinite scrolling feeds. I'm seeing autoplaying videos. I'm a teenager, but I'm getting barraged by push notifications in the middle of the night. And that's to say nothing of the recommendation algorithms that might be driving me toward content related to eating disorders or other things that are going to make me sad and upset.' And so some of these people get together with their attorneys and they say, 'This actually feels different from the thing that Section 230 was designed to protect.' Right? This is not about, oh, I got harmed by this particular piece of content. This is about the design of the whole platform. The design feels defective. And the really crazy thing about these cases, Kevin, is that juries agreed with these plaintiffs for the first time and they said, 'We like this theory. We think these products are defective.' Right.
This is kind of a side door that these lawyers have found around litigating on Section 230, which they have successfully now shown that at least in these cases can convince a jury that it is not about what's on the social network content-wise. It's about the actual sort of mechanics and plumbing of the social network that are harmful to people.
That's right. And we should say that we do expect some appeals here and until those are, you know, sort of fully exhausted, I can't tell you for certain this is the moment that the internet changed forever. But there's been a lot of commentary over the last weekend about what it would mean if these cases were upheld because it seems like juries are just going to be really, really sympathetic to these claims.
So before we get into the implications, like, can I just ask a couple more questions about these actual specific cases? So what are the actual platform mechanics that are being litigated over here?
Yes. So in the LA case, among the design features that were at issue were the so-called beauty filters that can make you, you know, look, quote unquote, more beautiful if you use them. Infinite scroll, autoplay video, these barrages of push notifications that platforms send, and also, I would argue more problematically, the recommendation algorithms that power the platform. And then in the New Mexico case, that was much more about kind of child safety. So they were arguing that Instagram in particular had become this playground for predators. It was very critical of the fact that Meta offers end-to-end encrypted messaging, and the basic idea was Meta falsely advertised that these platforms were safe when in reality children are being harmed there all the time.
So from what I understand, it was like the case was basically taken out of the playbook for going against big tobacco or another sort of industry that makes harmful products. You say this is harmful, and not only is it harmful, but the company that was making it knew that it was harmful and either made it more harmful or just released it as planned. Anyway, I did see some sort of exhibits that had been shown off at the LA trial, I believe, where some employees at Meta were sort of talking on their internal forums about how this stuff is so addictive for kids. That seems bad. And I imagine that was persuasive with the jury, but are there other instances where the platforms are being sort of taken to court over things that they sort of knew were harming people and that they either dialed up the harm in an attempt to spike engagement or sort of willingly, you know, sort of knowingly released these things to the public?
Yeah. So I mean, some of this research has come up in other litigation over the years, but I think this has been probably the most damaging case that we've seen. You know, the first time I remember reading a lot of these internal studies was in the wake of the Frances Haugen revelations a few years back, right? Like Frances Haugen walks out the door of Meta and takes a bunch of this internal research with her, winds up sharing it with the Wall Street Journal and then eventually a bunch of other reporters, including me. The reason that the research mattered a lot here, though, Kevin, was again the plaintiffs are now building this very specific case, which is you're building a defective product, right? Before the past couple of years, we weren't really using this language. We weren't really adopting this sort of public health framing of a way to discuss the harms of social media. Before then, it was just kind of this more nebulous like, hmm, like they're studying the effect of Instagram on teen girls and it seems like some of these girls are having really bad outcomes, but we didn't really have the framing. Well, now we have the framing and we're just saying like, hey, you looked into it. You found that some subset of your users are having really bad experiences and you did not change the features, and so that mattered.
Well, let's talk about the changes. So, what would you expect a platform like Instagram or Facebook or YouTube to change in the wake of these jury verdicts, or are they just going to wait till it all shakes out on appeal?
I honestly don't know the answer to that question. I think it's a really interesting thing to watch. The question that you just asked is really, really controversial, actually, because much of what these platforms do is just protected under the First Amendment, right? And then Section 230 also protects a lot of speech, right? And the big debate that's like raging in the internet policy community right now is: can you separate design from content? I want to get your thoughts about this.
Right. Is it like the container, or is it the stuff in the container that is dangerous?
Yeah, and there are some people who are saying that no, you cannot make that distinction and that effectively all design is content, right? Like if I want to send you a push notification, that is my right under the First Amendment and you cannot tell me that I cannot do that. You cannot tell me that there is a certain limit that I have to place on the depth that you can scroll in Instagram, like that is protected. But for what it's worth, juries are taking the opposite view. They're saying that there are at least some things which seem like are just clear mechanical design features, and I happen to agree with them.
So let's talk about this because I think this is maybe a place where you and I disagree, or at least where I have some misgivings about this theory. So in the case of something like cigarettes, which is a very heavily litigated field that I think a lot of this social media litigation has been modeled after, there's like an addictive ingredient, right? Nicotine. Everything that you put nicotine in becomes more addictive as a result of having nicotine in it. You know, this happens with cigarettes. It happens with vapes. It happens with, you know, nicotine pouches. If you started putting nicotine in ice cream, ice cream sales would go up because nicotine is very addictive. I think the question I have about the mechanical addictiveness of these sort of features like infinite scroll, like autoplay recommendations, is that if it followed the same principle as nicotine, that every product that has those would become way more popular. And one example I've been thinking about on this is Sora. They sort of took the playbook that was working for TikTok and Instagram and they put it onto a new app and the app did not succeed. Right. There are other apps that have tried to mimic things like the news feed that have tried to mimic things like autoplay video or recommendation algorithms that have not taken off. And so I guess the question in my mind is like, if the litigation over social media is modeled after the litigation over big tobacco, shouldn't there be like some industry-wide lift as a result of every sort of platform trying to borrow the most addictive features of Facebook and Instagram and YouTube.
I mean, I hear what you're saying and I think it's an interesting point, but I think that internet platforms just work differently than cigarettes, right? Like, because you're right, like with nicotine, like nicotine is just addictive. Now there are people that smoke cigarettes without getting addicted to them, right? But probably the majority of people do. Social media platforms are an imperfect analog to those cigarettes. I believe that platforms need to be of a certain scale in order for them to be truly addictive in the way that these plaintiffs are now suing about. Right. There's something about the fact that there's hundreds of millions of people on Instagram and on TikTok creating content that creates that kind of infinite supply of things that you might potentially want to watch that is actually able to...
But now you're talking about the stuff in the container, right?
Well, I think that there are many ingredients that all work together, right? But you're raising a criticism that people are making of this lawsuit. Like effectively what I hear you saying is you cannot distinguish between the content and the...
I'm not sure. I mean, I think I'm open to being persuaded that you can, but to my mind, it's like one lesson that you could take from this is that it is very bad to be a popular platform that engages these mechanics to keep users coming back, but it's okay to be an obscure platform that does it because that's not going to have as much harm. So what's really sort of at issue here is the fact that these platforms are very, very good and very, very popular at doing the thing that everyone else is trying to copy.
Yes. And this is the approach that Europe has taken to regulating these platforms, right? They have certain like categories, and if you are a very large online platform, then you just have more responsibility. That makes intuitive sense to me. I think the bigger and richer and more powerful you are, the more responsibility that you have to society. Right? And so in this particular case, you have companies like Meta, which we know are hiring cognitive scientists who are working very hard to figure out all the different ways that they can hack your brain to get you to look at Instagram for as long as they possibly can. It is in their interest to get you to look at Instagram as long as they possibly can. And right now, there's just no break on that at all in our society except for this litigation. So I'm so sympathetic to these juries that are looking around. They're seeing this, you know, almost completely unregulated platform and they're saying something's got to be done.
Yeah. So, regardless of sort of what our thoughts on the overall sort of legal theory here are, like what do you think the effects are on the platforms if this does get held up on appeal, if these platforms are found liable for millions or potentially billions of dollars in damages against all of these people who claim that they were harmed by social media? Does that mean that they have to, I don't know, go back to like the reverse chronological feed of 2008? Does that mean they have to shut off, you know, infinite scroll and autoplay and recommendations and all these other things?
This is where it gets really tricky and this is like maybe the one narrow way in which I'm sympathetic to the platforms, which is, okay, the juries have said your product is defective. What juries have not said is here's what an okay product looks like. Right? They're saying we don't like this sort of set of features, but they're not saying with any specificity like, well, how do we think that these features are interacting, right? Like what is your actual model of the harm here? And so there is a world where the platforms feel like they have to comply and they maybe start picking off some of these features one by one, like, okay, if you're like under 16, we'll disable infinite scroll, for example. How much benefit does that really have to like the individual teenager who may be struggling? I don't know. This, of course, is why it would be great if Congress could pass some sort of law regulating this, but you know, we're now like, I don't know, a decade into that project and still not getting very far.
Yeah. I mean, I think one prediction about how this will change platforms and their behavior is that if you start talking about gambling or addictiveness on an internal Meta chat room, you just immediately get fired.
There's just like a little button on your seat that just presses and you get ejected out of the building.
Yes. It's like because so much of the incriminating evidence here just comes from people like spouting off in work chat rooms about like, oh, it really seems like this thing we're doing is dangerous. And like I have to imagine that if it hasn't happened already, they are just going to absolutely crack down on that kind of internal discussion.
Absolutely. Well, so I want to hear a little bit more about how you think about this because you have talked on this show many times about your own struggles to look at your phone less. This is an issue that, you know, at various times you feel like has plagued you. So how are you feeling about the addictiveness of these platforms? Like do you buy the sort of public health framing for the way that people are talking about them these days, or do you think that this is overreach?
So I need to do some more thinking about the product harm arguments here and whether it makes sense to me. I am basically on board with the idea that there should be age gating for social media. I am sold on the premise that there is a certain age, whether it's 16 or 18 or 14, where sort of the most harmful effects taper off, and I think before that age it makes total sense to age gate or at least give parents a lot more control over what their kids are able to do and not on these platforms. I think the addictiveness question is just hard for me because I feel like my sort of macro theory on all this stuff is that what is happening to social media over time is that the social part is fading away and the media part is rising in the mix. And so I think that if you start treating the design and mechanical decisions of these media platforms as harmful under the law, it just sort of leads me into a place where I become much less certain. Like before any of this existed, there were cliffhangers on TV shows that were designed to keep you coming back after the commercial break or to the next week's episode or whatever. Those were arguably addictive features. They would keep people coming back. Is that illegal? I would say probably it shouldn't be. And it's not. So I think there is a certain sense in which the closer that social media moves to something like TV or streaming video, the blurrier the lines in my mind get between the content and the mechanics. What are your thoughts on that?
Well, I have to disagree. I do think cliffhangers should be illegal because I want to know what happened. I don't want to have to wait till the fall to find out, you know, if that person is still alive. But also I do think that there are some really important differences between like, let's say, YouTube and HBO Max, right? Like HBO Max is not like going to modify the content of HBO to your individual preferences, right? Like they're going to go pay some money for a bunch of shows and they're going to hope a bunch of people watch them. The platforms that we're talking about are doing something very different, right? They're looking across the entire corpus of like every video that's ever been uploaded to their platform and they're trying to figure out what will keep you personally here the longest and we're going to show you that as much as we can. So I just do think that there's a kind of categorical difference here. And while I do think people should have broad freedom to, you know, look at whatever they want, I do think that at a minimum we should probably place an age gate on it for the same reason that we don't let 14-year-olds walk into bars unless they're really cool and have a fake ID.
So talk about the encryption piece because you had a line about this in your newsletter that I didn't quite understand, but what is the encryption debate that's part of these lawsuits?
Yeah. So, you know, here I understand that I'm coming across as being broadly supportive of these jury verdicts, which I am, but I do want to acknowledge like this could lead to some really bad places, like, and this is why we needed to handle Section 230 with care. In the New Mexico case, the attorney general argues that a reason that Meta should be considered liable in advertising their platform as being safe for children is that it includes encrypted messaging, right? In fact, Meta in March announced that they would discontinue encrypted messaging on Instagram in what I believe was an effort to sort of get ahead of this. What they said was, 'Look, if you want to use encrypted messaging, you can use WhatsApp instead.' But to me, this would be like just a legitimately horrible outcome of all of this is if like every company that now offers encrypted messaging either voluntarily decided to stop offering it or was pressured by the government to stop offering it because in my view encryption is a necessary part of privacy in a world where people are mostly communicating online.
Are you comfortable with all of this happening in the courts through jury verdicts?
This is not my preferred way of addressing this, but I think it was inevitable in part because the tech companies have been so obstinate about making meaningful changes to their platforms, right? Like societies across the world have been begging these companies for a decade, please do something to make these platforms safer and to make them less addictive and to reduce some of the harms. And instead, what we've mostly seen is a series of engagement hacks designed to get people to look at them longer. Right? And in the United States, where you cannot regulate the content of any of these apps for the most part, you're really only left with the design, right? You're really only left with just the raw mechanics of the app. So if the social media platforms are upset about the verdict here, I truly believe they brought this on themselves.
I mean, you asked me about my own experience of screen addiction and I am not, I have never been sort of a total screen addict, but I have struggled, like I think you know many, many other people have, with like how much I'm using my phone, how much I'm using various apps. I have come up with sort of convoluted ways of trying to reduce my screen time.
You once were six hours late to a Hard Fork taping because you wanted to find out what happened to Chimpanzee Benzini on TikTok.
I thought we agreed to keep that private, but like never in all my struggles with screen time have I thought to sue the companies that were making the apps that went on my phone. And I guess it's different when you're talking about kids, but like there is some part of me that just feels like, well, it just feels like an easy way out. You know, blame the platforms. And look, I think these platforms absolutely have culpability here. I am not saying that I disagree with these jury verdicts. I think that these platforms, especially Meta, have done the research, have found the harms, and have shielded them from the public. But I just, I guess I'm thinking about my own experience of these addictive platforms being one of like feeling bad about myself rather than trying to, you know, find someone else to blame.
Yes. But you also had the benefit of beginning to use these platforms when you were already an adult, right? Like your hippocampus was formed and I think...
I was on instant messenger from a very early age.
Do you really think that like messaging apps are like as addictive and harmful in the same way as like TikTok or Instagram is?
Take me back to 1999. Put me on AOL Instant Messenger. I could not tear myself away from that thing. I had to put up a little message with, you know, Get Up Kids lyrics on it every time I left the computer because it was such a rare event and I wanted my friends to know that I was away from keyboard. Casey, these things were addictive. The kid got up. It's a Get Up Kids joke. Yeah, I like, look, I just think that like messaging apps are different from like these social platforms, you know. And I think, you know, honestly, like I will be curious, you know, who knows if Instagram and TikTok will be what they still are in like 10 years, maybe when your son is ready or wants to use social media. But I just think that it probably just feels very different than when you're a parent.
Well, Casey, are there any new social media apps that you're addicted to?
It's called Claude and it's really...
Wait, I do want to talk about the AI angle. So obviously every discussion on this show has to come back to AI at some point. So I'm curious like what effects you think this might have on some of these AI companies because they are also trying to create experiences that are engaging, addictive, whatever you want to call it. I can imagine some of these, you know, lawsuits that are being brought against the makers of chatbots for harms, like it all feels like it's sort of going to converge at some point. So what's your take on that?
Yeah, so Pew did a study in 2025 and found that 64% of teens now use AI chatbots. About 3 in 10 use them daily. That same survey said that the teen use of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat had remained relatively stable. Right? So yes, chatbot usage is growing. It has not yet come at the expense of the social platforms. Although of course I expect that we'll soon see chatbots inside all of those platforms, right? And like these things will all just kind of merge together. There's something about these things where they do kind of go hand in hand. And to your point, like I think that yes, AI chatbots will be the next frontier of this debate because in many ways they're much more engaging and I think like will be stickier than even these platforms are.
Yeah. I mean, it just seems so obvious to me that the platforms should be like absolutely begging Congress to regulate them because the alternative is like they just get sued into oblivion by a bunch of, you know, law firms.
I mean, absolutely. Like if I were running one of the big AI labs, I would want to have an understanding from Congress of like what do you consider a safe chatbot? Like give me a checklist that I can follow because I don't want to have to be dealing with this in, you know, the next few years.
Yeah. Casey, what's an addictive engagement mechanism we could use to get people to come back after the break?
Well, we could study their behavior and weaponize it against them.
Well, Casey, if our listeners read one book about AI this year, it should be mine. But if they read two books, the second one should be Sebastian Mallaby's new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.
Tell us about this book, Kevin.
This book came out this week. It is full of a bunch of new anecdotes and stories about the work of DeepMind and the motivations that drive its CEO, Demis Hassabis. Sebastian is a longtime journalist. He's a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and he spent a long time with Demis and the people close to him and brought us this book about what I think is the AI frontier lab that gets the least coverage relative to its importance.
Yeah. And look, I mean, Demis Hassabis is a singular figure. He's been on Hard Fork several times, but Sebastian went really, really deep and I think maybe gave us the most fully featured portrait of the man that we've had to date. And before we bring him in, because we're going to talk about AI, let's make our disclosures. I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity. And my fiance works for Anthropic. Sebastian Mallaby, welcome to Hard Fork.
So people who listen to our show are familiar with Demis Hassabis and DeepMind. He's been on several times. What is something non-obvious about Demis that you learned through talking with him through many hours and interviewing many people who know him?
I mean, I think maybe the spiritual underpinning for his scientific curiosity was interesting. You know, there was one time when we were sitting in this London park and talking for a couple of hours and he suddenly started saying, you know, when I'm up at 2 in the morning at my desk by myself thinking about science, thinking about computer science, I feel reality is screaming at me, staring me in the face, waiting for me to explain it. And he calls it the God of Spinoza. That this is the 17th century philosopher Spinoza who said that to understand nature is getting closer to God's creation. And that resonates with Demis. Maybe that's something people don't know.
That's interesting. I mean, yeah, this has been something that's come up in my own research, too, is that he grew up going to church, I believe, with his mother. And I think unlike a lot of the other sort of AI leaders, has a way of sort of fusing the science of AI with his own spiritual beliefs. And I know some folks have seen his ambition and his many years of competing to build AGI and have seen something suspicious in that, right? Elon Musk has this whole theory about how Demis secretly wants to be an evil AI dictator who takes over the world. And I guess I'm curious if in any of your reporting with him, you ever saw something that seemed like what Elon Musk was talking about?
No, I mean, to the contrary. I think this idea that Demis is a quote evil genius, which is the phrase that Elon used to use, came from the fact that in his video game production days, Demis had created a game called Evil Genius. And so maybe it was a joke at first, but you know, really I got to know Demis extremely well. I spent more than 30 hours with him. You stress test people quite deeply, as you know, Kevin, when you're writing about them and then you might get pushback and legal threats and all that stuff. And he did make me talk to his lawyer once, and it wasn't totally easy the whole time, but you know, he was reasonable in the end.
Why did he make you talk to his lawyer?
He was very mad at the fact that I unearthed the whole story about DeepMind trying to spin out of Google between 2016 and 2019. And you know, they retained a whole bunch of advisers, lawyers, bankers, etc. They got Reid Hoffman to pledge a billion dollars to finance the spinout. They went to see, you know, Joe Tsai in Hong Kong, the Alibaba co-founder. Anyway, so the lawyer was not amused that I had all these internal documents from inside DeepMind which had been leaked to me, the board presentation that DeepMind gave to Google and so forth. And he said, you know, you're not supposed to be writing about this. And I said, well, you know, people gave me this stuff and tough. So there were moments of free and frank discussion.
I have always believed that when a source gives you secret documents, it helps you get closer to God's creation. So that's what I would have told him. I wanted to ask another question about childhood because Demis told you that he really identified with the boy genius protagonist of the novel Ender's Game and of relating to this feeling of being socially isolated by his own talent and consumed by a desire to make his mark on the universe. And the reason it struck me is that in this novel, Ender believes that he's doing training exercises, but then what he thinks is like a test, essentially a video game, accidentally wipes out an alien species. So I wondered if you talked with him about like why he relates to that story and in particular if there's any relation to that and the idea of maybe trying to build a superintelligence.
Well, I was astonished. You know, this was before my first dinner with him. And it was sort of in kind of the vetting process. It was the last part of the vetting process where he agreed to give me the access I needed. And he said, you know, you got to read this novel before you come and see me. And so I show up. I've read this story. It's about a diminutive boy genius who basically saves humanity from aliens. And I'm thinking, does he really see himself as like saving humanity by doing what he's doing with AI? And even if he thinks that, why would he say he's so crazy as to tell me? I mean, surely that's hubristic beyond belief. Why would you put that out there? And you know, he made no secret about it. He said, yeah, you know, I feel like I identify because this guy put all of his energy and his life into saving humanity, and I feel like I'm on a mission like that. And he said, I felt so strongly about this. I gave it to my wife to read it, thinking that she would understand me better and sympathize with me. And you know what? She sympathized with the kid, Ender, but not with me. That's not fair.
Yeah, that's really... I mean, one other character trait that comes up over and over again in reporting about Demis and especially in your book is how competitive he is. This is a guy who loves to win. You know, he was a child chess prodigy and he won this thing called the Pentamind, you know, five times, which is sort of like an all-around gaming competition. Do you think that is part of his approach to AI? I mean, he's always talking about how he wants to use this to solve scientific mysteries and cure diseases, but is some part of it just like this guy loves to win and this is a really big contest?
Totally. I mean, that's exactly right. I remember going to see him, you know, when ChatGPT was just going viral, and he said, you know, Sebastian, this is war. These guys at OpenAI, they've parked the tanks in my front yard. He actually said, park the tanks on my lawn. Because he's English, but yeah, you get it.
You bring up the release of ChatGPT, which happens in November 2022, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about how Demis had reacted to that because I think before that happened Google really thought they were comfortably in the lead and did not seem to be feeling a lot of pressure to release anything. So I'm particularly interested if in hindsight Demis has regrets about the fact that they sort of let Sam Altman beat them to the punch.
Yeah. I mean, he has an explanation more than a regret, and the explanation is super interesting. It's basically that because he studied neuroscience for his PhD, and you got to remember this is back in, you know, 2008, 2009, so nothing worked in AI, so you were starting from scratch, and one of the ideas in neuroscience is called action in perception, and this is...
The idea that to really be intelligent, you have to take action in the world. You don't know what it means for something to be heavy unless you pick it up. You don't know what gravity is unless you actually drop something. And so he had this idea when the transformer paper came out in 2017 and OpenAI was starting to do, you know, the first GPT in 2018, second one in 2019, and so forth. You know, that's not going to work. It's not going to take you all the way to powerful intelligence because language is just a system of symbols. It's not grounded in the real world. And it's not that he was wrong in the sense that now we see world models come back in 2026 as a big area of excitement and research. But back in 2018, 2019, he was missing the fact that a huge amount of knowledge about how the real world works is in fact in language if you download all the language on the internet, and he missed how much you could squeeze out of language as a training set.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I want to run a theory by you, Sebastian, for your take. But as I've been working on my own book about this sort of period at Google and at OpenAI and at DeepMind, it strikes me that there are sort of like two visions of what intelligence is that these companies disagree on. And in one vision, it's like intelligence is about winning. It's about optimization. It's about a contest between rival intelligences. And that's very much like the DeepMind sort of reinforcement learning paradigm, which is like AlphaGo, and you know, you play a board game a bunch of times and you get better at it a little more every time. And then there's this other view, which is sort of the more OpenAI sort of language model scaling paradigm, which is like, no, it's about like answering questions. Like being very smart is about having the right answer to everything. Does that theory hold water with you, that there's something like psychological about these two approaches to AI development that actually are rooted in like what we think intelligence actually is?
Yeah, I would say that the DeepMind special sauce right from the beginning was to try to put those two things together. It's interesting, for example, that with AlphaGo, the early research on that, Ilya Sutskever contributed to it, and of course he was, you know, the sort of leading practitioner of deep learning, went on to be OpenAI's chief scientist, but at the time he was working for Google because Google had acquired his boutique. And so the reinforcement learning people in London working for DeepMind collaborated with the deep learning people in Mountain View, and that's what produced the AlphaGo breakthrough. So I think you're right. There are these two strands within AI of reinforcement learning, which I would describe as learning through experience, interaction with the real world through trial and error, and on the other hand, learning through data, and that is the deep learning. And for humans, you could think of it as being, you know, you can go to the library and read all the books, and that would be deep learning. You're learning from data, from sort of crystallized human knowledge. Or you can go out there in the real world and learn about stuff by, you know, planting your garden and whatever. You know, you can be like, I've never read a book. So get around to it. Learn by trial and error. Yeah. So we're sort of the two approaches here.
You mentioned earlier this, I don't know if it's fair to call it a plot. It sort of seems like a plot that they had at one point after they had gotten acquired by Google to try to spin themselves out. I believe they call this Project Mario. I would love to hear a little bit more about how that came about and why they didn't go through with it.
So what happened was that when they sold DeepMind to Google in 2014, they had a rival offer from Facebook. And Facebook actually offered them more cash. And one of the reasons they said no was that they wanted safety protections around their technology. And so they had this deal. There was going to be a safety and ethics board. And Google promised that, and they went ahead and sold to Google. And they had a first meeting of the safety and ethics board in 2015 after the acquisition. And in order to like bind in the other people in the space, they got Elon Musk to host the whole safety and ethics board at SpaceX. They got Reid Hoffman to show up. And you will notice that then these are the characters who either found OpenAI or fund it in those two. So Google wasn't best pleased, as you can imagine.
I have to say that doesn't seem like a very ethical thing to do. You know, maybe not the people I would have put on my ethics board. These characters.
But it's a dichotomy, right? A dilemma. I mean, you know, either you put people on the board who don't know what they're talking about and are not interested in AI, or they do know about AI, in which case they want to go and do their own thing because it's too exciting not to. And a fundamental mistake that Demis made in his early conceptualization of how AI would be developed was this notion that there would be one single lab producing AI on behalf of all humanity, and therefore it could be safe because there'd be no race dynamic, and you could take your time in sort of red-teaming the models before you release them. And, you know, that's why he brought Musk into the tent. That's why he brought Reid Hoffman into the tent, precisely because he thought we could all be one team together. And so then what happened after, to answer your question, Casey? So what happened after was that having lost that first experiment in setting up a safety and ethics oversight board, Google didn't want to do another one. And really DeepMind's project, Project Mario, was to try and force them to do more by threatening to walk out if they didn't.
Why do they call it Project Mario? Was that about the video game?
Good question. I don't know the answer. Sorry. And so it's much better than the alternative Project Wario they were working on, which was just the evil version of that.
So how does Google get them to abandon this plan?
You know, it's attrition. Sundar Pichai, his personality and his management style comes out quite interestingly in this whole story because, you know, right at the beginning in 2015, when, you know, the first safety and ethics oversight board fails, the next idea that Demis has for how to get some independence and control of the technology is to become a bet, as in an Alphabet, when they were spinning out Waymo and, you know, some of the other side bets they had. And Larry Page was cool with this, and he was CEO at the time. But then right as these discussions were going on, he handed over to Sundar, and Sundar kind of pretended to say, "Oh yeah, absolutely great idea. We should look into it." But really he was just spinning them along and had no intention whatsoever of letting Demis spin out because he recognized him as the AI talent that Google was going to need in the future. And so essentially there was this long drawn-out, you know, delays here, and we should just look at some more details. And here's another term sheet. And I was given some of these term sheets. They're like huge, great documents with red lines all over them, where, you know, one team of lawyers had come back to the other team of lawyers. And, you know, basically by 2019, everybody was exhausted. It all fizzled out, and they just moved on.
There's been a lot of sort of jostling for independence within DeepMind ever since the earliest negotiations about selling to Google. Give us an update on how things are going with them now. Like, you know, when we talk to them, they present things as being, you know, fairly like hunky-dory between everyone, but are there still kind of tensions and fault lines between Google and DeepMind?
Well, you know, I'll give you sort of what I would regard as somewhere between probably true and unconfirmed rumor. Is that all right? Can I, am I allowed to do that? Please.
We love the gossip on the show. Spill the tea. Yeah.
So I'd say that, you know, Sergey Brin is the troublemaker here. That he, one of the Google I/Os, I guess it was a couple of years ago, the stage was set up for two people to be on it. There was the interviewer and there was Demis. And suddenly Sergey kind of runs onto the stage. They have to get a third chair, and then he kind of inserts himself into that conversation. And, you know, what I hear is that that was the outward symptom of a much deeper tension where Sergey doesn't really like Demis' leadership on this and wants to push back against it. And I think it follows from that that the single most important business buddy act in all of capitalism today is the one between Sundar Pichai and Demis, because Sundar manages the board, manages the sort of high politics of Google and Alphabet, that Demis has the space, the resources, the oxygen to go do his science. And without Sundar holding that all together, we might be in a different place.
