00:00You first started DeepMind, you co-founded it a number of years ago.
00:04About 2014, you sold it to Google for about $500 million at the time.
00:10It was a hot deal. I know Meta wanted it too.
00:12And from my perspective, I think we're going to look back on that moment
00:16as one of the most transformative moments in business history.
00:19When you look back on that, how do you feel about that moment?
00:23How did you make that decision? Did you know it was going to be such a big moment at the
00:26time?
00:26We did, actually. Those of us that were involved in the science.
00:30So it's interesting. We started DeepMind in 2010, which was 15 years plus ago now.
00:35And nobody was talking about AI.
00:37But we knew and we set out with the mission of solving intelligence
00:40and then using it to solve everything else.
00:42So we wanted to be the first company to build artificial general intelligence.
00:45And the main thing we wanted to apply to was solving scientific problems.
00:49So when Google came along in 2014, and it was actually driven by Larry at the time,
00:54Larry Page, who was the CEO, we knew that in some ways we were sort of underselling.
00:58But on the other hand, what mattered to me was not the money.
01:01It was being able to, it was the mission and be able to accelerate our progress towards
01:06artificial general intelligence and answering the scientific questions that we were trying to solve.
01:12And I felt that teaming up with Google would accelerate that,
01:15mostly because they had, obviously, enormous compute power.
01:19And we see today that how important that is for developing intelligence.
01:23I did mention to Larry and also the head of search at the time who was driving the deal
01:27that this would turn out to be, although it didn't look like it now,
01:30it might turn out to be the most important acquisition Google has ever done,
01:33which is saying something because they acquired YouTube and Android.
01:37They've got a good history of buying important things.
01:39They've got a good history of buying things.
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