超知能をつくり、制御しようとする男 The Man Who Wants to Build—and Control—Superintelligence

今回のエピソードでは、ハサビス氏の数奇なキャリアと彼が描くAIの未来を追いながら、テクノロジーの進化に伴う光と影について英語で読み解いていきます

今回のポッドキャストです。お聴き下さい。

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Long before Demis Hassabis became one of the world’s leading AI scientists, he was a chess prodigy in North London. He began playing at four and was competing with adults while still a child. Chess taught him to plan several moves ahead—but it also made him wonder how the human mind could solve difficult problems.

As a teenager, Hassabis entered the video-game industry. He helped design Theme Park, a popular simulation game, before studying computer science at Cambridge University. Later, instead of remaining in the profitable gaming business, he turned toward neuroscience. He completed a doctorate at University College London, studying memory and imagination. His unusual career connected three worlds: games, the brain and computers.

In 2010, Hassabis co-founded DeepMind with an ambitious mission: to “solve intelligence” and then use it to solve other problems. Google acquired the company in 2014. Two years later, its AlphaGo system defeated Lee Sedol, one of the world’s greatest Go players. The victory showed that AI could develop strategies that even expert humans found surprising.

DeepMind then moved beyond games. Its AlphaFold system predicted the three-dimensional structures of proteins, a challenge that had frustrated scientists for decades. The breakthrough could accelerate research into diseases and new medicines. In 2024, Hassabis and DeepMind researcher John Jumper shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David Baker for work on proteins.

Sebastian Mallaby’s biography, The Infinity Machine, presents Hassabis as a brilliant scientist pursuing artificial general intelligence: a system able to perform many intellectual tasks at or beyond the human level. Hassabis argues that such technology could transform medicine, energy and scientific discovery.

But his story raises a harder question. Can a scientist remain in control of an invention once it becomes commercially and geopolitically valuable?

DeepMind began with a scientific mission, but it now operates inside one of the world’s most powerful corporations. Advanced AI also matters to governments, militaries and global competition. Hassabis may help create a machine of extraordinary intelligence. Yet deciding how that machine is used may no longer be his move alone. That tension may define both his legacy and our future.