If you haven't already watched it, The Thinking Game is a fascinating and inspirational video. It tells the inside story of how Deep Mind, led by Demis Hassabis, produced AlphaFold and what this breakthrough in AI means for the future.

This film had its world premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Festival and then made a successful international tour, the film, 83 minutes in length is now available on You Tube for all to watch for free.

Filmed over five years by Greg Kohs and the AlphaGo team , the documentary examines how Demis Hassabis’s early experiences as a Chess prodigy shaped his lifelong pursuit of artificial general intelligence. It chronicles the rigorous process of scientific discovery, documenting how the team moved from mastering complex strategy games to the ups and downs of solving a 50-year-old "protein folding problem" with AlphaFold.

To hook you in, this trailer reveals why the documentary's title is The Thinking Game.

The boy you see near the trailer's end is archival footage of Demis as a child, being asked by an interviewer what it is that he likes about the game of chess he is playing and he replies:

"It's just a good thinking game." 

The documentary highlights that by the age of 12, Demis was one of the highest-rated chess players in the world for his age group However, as it goes on to explain, his experiences with chess—including a painful loss at an international tournament in Liechtenstein where he resigned a drawn game due to exhaustion led him to realize that his brainpower could be used for something more impactful than board games, such as solving cancer or other major scientific challenges. This early passion for the "thinking game" of chess became the foundation for his lifelong quest to "solve intelligence" and apply it to the real world.

With Sean Legg, Hassabis founded DeepMind in 2010 with the "secret" goal: building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) since, at the time, AI was considered an "embarrassing" pursuit by academia. They gathered a group of "dreamers" in London to build a general learning machine that doesn't just do one task but learns to do many, much like a human child. They proved this thesis by creating an agent that could learn to play dozens of Atari games (like Pong and Breakout) from scratch, using only the pixels and the score as input.

DeepMind and first came to our attention in 2014 when we reported Google Buys Unproven AI Company, Deep Mind: 

Google seems to be serious about getting a slice of the AI business. It has now bought the UK start-up DeepMind Technologies for a very large sum of money, even though the company hasn't actually done anything very much yet.

However, with a new focus on the game of Go, DeepMind was making amazingly fast progress which I Programmer reported in great detail and with much enthusiasm, see our coverage of AlphaGo defeating world champion Lee Sedol on 2016 in this game that had previously be considered to be "incomputable" using the classic algorithmic approach and the View Point, Why AlphaGo Changes Everything.

By 2017 DeepMind was ready to turn away from games to tackle scientific problems at the end of the Future of Go summit, where AlphaGo defeated the world's top ranking Go player, 19-year old Ke Jie, Hassabis announced:

The research team behind AlphaGo will now throw their energy into the next set of grand challenges, developing advanced general algorithms that could one day help scientists as they tackle some of our most complex problems, such as finding new cures for diseases, dramatically reducing energy consumption, or inventing revolutionary new materials. If AI systems prove they are able to unearth significant new knowledge and strategies in these domains too, the breakthroughs could be truly remarkable.

The first target was Protein Folding, a problem that scientists had already been working on for 50 years since it provides the key to understanding life and disease. The documentary recounts how the DeepMinds's first attempt (AlphaFold 1) was state-of-the-art, but not accurate enough to be useful to biologists, but by "throwing the kitchen sink" at the problem by 2020, AlphaFold 2 effectively solved the problem resulting it DeepMind releasing the structures of 200 million proteins to the world for free as a "gift to humanity." 

AlphaFold was certainly a game changer, something recognized in 2024 both by a knighthood for Demis Hassabis and him being awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Hassabis concludes The Thinking Game with the comment at AI is poised to reinvent civilization. This is explored further in Demis Hassabis and Veritasium's Derek Muller talk AI a conversation recorded at the London premiere of The Thinking Game at the Science Museum. From it we learn that Isoporphic Labs, a spinoff from DeepMind founded in 2021 as a commercial vehicle for applying the AI breakthroughs made at DeepMind is making progress with drug treatments and that Hassabis predicts a "new golden age" for science, where AI breakthroughs will lead tosignificant progress in curing diseases, finding new energy sources, and tackling climate change within the next 10 years. 

Towards the end of this video Muller asks:

"In the film you talk about how the future will be radically different... what do you think the world will be like in 5 to 10 years? ... I have four kids... do I send them to school? Is that even worthwhile anymore?"

In reply, Hassabis says:

"For sure send them to school. I say that to my kids too.  I would say to kids these days is embrace the new technologies and as parents, I think let your kids play with them."

Hassabis views AI as a tool that will become "second nature" to children, much like the home computer was to his generation, extending what humans are capable of achieving.

Both the documentary and the subsequent exchange are well worth viewing. 

Related Articles

Google Buys Unproven AI Company, Deep Mind

Why AlphaGo Changes Everything 

AlphaGo Triumphs In China

Nobel Prize For Chemistry For AlphaFold

AlphaFold DeepMind's Protein Structure Breakthrough

AlphaFold Solves Fundamental Biology Problem

Why AlphaGo Changes Everything

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