The Guardian, 2021?
Excerpts:
Demis Hassabis: the deep mind Dominic Cummings turned to as the pandemic hit.
The AI researcher and co-founder of Google’s DeepMind
[Hassabis] was one of many who pressed for an hard lockdown in March 2020.
At first glance, Demis Hassabis is an unusual figure for Dominic Cummings to have turned to for guidance in March 2020 about the
threat of the novel coronavirus bearing down on the UK.
The co-founder of Google subsidiary
DeepMind, which is dedicated to high-level AI research, has a varied CV, but is no epidemiologist.
After completing his A-levels two years early, he [
Hassabis] joined video game studio Bullfrog, where he co-designed the hit classic Theme Park at just 17 years old, before leaving to study computer science at Cambridge. He returned to video game development for another decade, and, after switching back to academia and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, founded DeepMind in 2011.
Another branch of the company, the one Hassabis was more directly involved in, focused on theoretical breakthroughs first, with applications coming later: the company succeeded in building AIs with world-beating performance at games including Go, chess and the video game Starcraft II.
But, DeepMind says, Hassabis wasn’t invited to talk about his work. “Demis was one of several scientists who contributed his thoughts on the government’s response to Covid-19,” a DeepMind spokesperson told the Guardian. “He attended one Sage meeting in-person on 18 March. The views he shared with fellow Sage members, officials, and government advisers, including
Dominic Cummings, were based purely on reviewing publicly available international data.
“Along with many other scientists at the time,
Demis was a proponent of fast and decisive lockdown measures based on public evidence drawn from what was happening in other countries. He was acting in a personal capacity as a leading data scientist in the public interest.”
Cummings has a well-documented fascination with the world of science. In the same early stages of the UK’s response, he contacted Prof Timothy Gowers, a Fields-medal-winning mathematician, who was on the steering committee of the newly established Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics, or Delve, group, which
reported in favour of face mask use in May 2020. But, as well as being a generally respected scientist,
Hassabis is linked to the rationalist movement, which has guided much of Cummings’ thinking.
