When Demis Hassabis was 6 years old, he remembers his father giving him the age-old reassurance prompt used every day by millions of parents around the world—“do your best.” For a young Hassabis, already showing the precocious talents that were to culminate in his becoming one of the most important artificial intelligence leaders in the world, “do your best” opened up a whole host of possibilities.
“I’m a bit of an extreme person,” he said. “And I took it in a way [that’s] extreme and logical. I was sort of thinking: ‘What is your best? And how do I know I’ve done my best? It must mean to the point of complete exhaustion, just prior to near-death. Then you’ve done your best, have you? Isn’t that logical?’”
