Hard Fork The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT
1143 snips
Apr 3, 2026 
Sebastian Mallaby, journalist, author, and CFR fellow, drops in to trace Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the race to superintelligence. Then the conversation jumps to jury rulings against Meta and YouTube over addictive design, why AI chatbots could face similar scrutiny, and a wild grab bag of headlines from rogue bots to creepy Olaf robots and viral AI fruit videos.
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Two Rival Theories Of Intelligence Shaped Modern AI
- Kevin Roose frames AI's split as two theories of intelligence, one built on optimizing through competition and one on answering from vast knowledge.
- Sebastian Mallaby says DeepMind's distinctive bet was combining reinforcement learning with deep learning, as in AlphaGo's London and Mountain View collaboration.
How DeepMind Secretly Tried To Escape Google
- DeepMind tried for years to spin out of Google after its promised safety and ethics structure fell apart.
- Sebastian Mallaby says they recruited advisers, got Reid Hoffman to pledge $1 billion, met Joe Tsai, and used Project Mario to pressure Google.
Sundar Pichai Quietly Locked DeepMind Inside Google
- Sebastian Mallaby portrays Sundar Pichai as the quiet force who kept DeepMind inside Google by delaying every path to independence.
- He says Sergey Brin remains a source of tension, making the Pichai-Hassabis alliance one of capitalism's most important partnerships.
