Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis on the long game of AI
- 4 days ago
- 1 min read

FAST COMPANY — Long before the fruits of DeepMind’s work were everywhere, the company was a research lab whose early focus was on training algorithms to play games. That didn’t just connect them back to Hassabis’s childhood Othello app. From the very dawn of AI, researchers have used gaming as a canvas for discovery. For example, back in 2019, I wrote about a 1960 TV special that documented IBM’s checkers-playing computer.
Games are so powerful as a research tool because they’re “a microcosm of something important in real life,” explains Hassabis. “And we get to practice it many times in an environment that’s serious, but not serious, in a sense.”
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