Demis Hassabis
Article
Demis Hassabis is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between July 01, 2022 and March 09, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Other co-founder Demis Hassabis says “I wouldn’t be super surprised in the next decade or two.""; “co-founded by Demis Hassabis, who has said things like :”; “Demis Hassabis sometimes says that he might slow DeepMind down once they get close to superintelligence”. It most often appears alongside Anthropic, Sam Altman, Open Philanthropy.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: July 01, 2022
- Last seen: March 09, 2026
Appears In
- Links For June
- Why Not Slow AI Progress?
- Links For May 2023
- In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
- Lives Of The Rationalist Saints
- Open Thread 424
Related Pages
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- Anthropic (4 shared issues)
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- Sam Altman (4 shared issues)
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- Open Philanthropy (3 shared issues)
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- Paul Christiano (3 shared issues)
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- Twitter (3 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (2 shared issues)
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- AI Safety (2 shared issues)
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- Dario Amodei (2 shared issues)
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- DeepMind (2 shared issues)
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- Democrats (2 shared issues)
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- Dylan Matthews (2 shared issues)
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- Eliezer Yudkowsky (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
4: DeepMind on AGI (podcast transcript). Co-founder Shane Legg says that "maybe we will have an AGI in a decade". Other co-founder Demis Hassabis says "I wouldn't be super surprised in the next decade or two." Hassabis also reveals that he's asked Terence Tao about working on AI alignment (no sign Tao is interested).
Inline links: DeepMind on AGI
…and by Demis Hassabis, who has said things like:
Inline links: said things like
And also: maybe the companies will work with us on stopgap solutions. I know one team trying to get everyone to agree to a common safety policy around publishing potentially dangerous results. The companies are hearing them out. If we need regulation, and want to go the “company-approved regulatory capture” route, we can work with the companies to help draft it. Demis Hassabis sometimes says that he might slow DeepMind down once they get close to superintelligence; maybe other friendly companies can be convinced to work with him on that.
Demis Hassabis is also the former world champion of the game Diplomacy, which means that trying to backstab him would be like trying to out-shoot Steph Curry. The argument for betraying: pretty slim, actually. We would damage the companies closest to us, have a harder time damaging companies further away, and lose all of the advantages above.
Inline links: former world champion
Can’t even list all the new people who have come out as AI x-risk believers, but you can just read the CAIS statement. The top signatures are Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei; aside from the usual suspects, they also have Bruce Schneier (computer security expert) , Dawn Song (computer scientist and security expert), Andy Clark (professor of cognitive philosophy, wrote Surfing Uncertainty), Eliezer Yudkowsky (he didn't sign the last one because he disagreed with specifics, but he's here), and a former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense.
Inline links: CAIS statement
Founded the field of AI safety, and incubated it from nothing up to the point where Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and hundreds of others have endorsed it and urged policymakers to take it seriously.11
Inline links: have endorsed it, 11
St. Joanne of ARC had a resume so beautiful that Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk all sought her hand as employee. They became increasingly insistent that she choose one of them, and refused to take ‘no’ as an answer. She asked Paul Christiano what to do, and on his advice she called the three men together and said “I will make my decision once my simple twenty-line program finishes running”. After they agreed, she revealed that her program was calculating BusyBeaver(100), and they all admitted they were unworthy of her. She cut her hair, gave her jewelry to the poor, and joined the Alignment Research Center, where she discovered many important theorems. Some say Jane Street is named after her, although others attribute it to a St. Jane of Manhattan who is otherwise unrecorded.
2: StopTheRace.ai will be holding a protest on Saturday, March 21 in front of major AI company offices, asking them to commit to a mutual pause (ie to stop AI research if every other AI company in the world agrees to do so). Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind has already informally agreed to something like this in principle (which is why GDM isn’t being protested), and Anthropic has expressed interest but its new responsible scaling policy stops short of an explicit commitment. I think this is a reasonable ask, albeit so unlikely to happen that protests about it will probably do more to raise awareness than be a coherent plan in themselves. If you’re curious about the details of an AI pause, I expect to be able to provide more information in a few months.