My Review of Sebastian Mallaby's "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deep Mind......."

 The Prophet of AI

 

Sebastian Mallaby, Council on Foreign Relations fellow, tells us the story of artificial general intelligence through the life of Demis Hassabis, the founder of Google’s Deep Mind. The story is not limited to Hassabis as Mallaby discusses his rivalry with Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. Along the way we meet venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Mallaby also goes into great detail as to how AI works and how AI agents can hallucinate and go rogue. Thus, in a way the book is primer on AI.

 

Hassabis is the son of immigrants to North London, with a Chinese Singaporean Mom and a Greek Cypriot father. As a child he was chess prodigy and was a champion by age 13. From chess Hassabis moves on to gaming, first a player and then as a successful designer. He gets degrees from Cambridge in physics and neuroscience which gives him an excellent background to pursue his interest in AI.

 

He forms Deep Mind in 2010 with the support of Peter Thiel and other venture capitalists. There he and his colleagues do pioneering work in deep learning and reinforced learning. In 2014 Google bought out Deep Mind for $650 million, making Hassabis worth $134 million. His interest is not in money but rather pursuing the science of artificial general intelligence. Their models became experts at the highly complicated game of Go, so much so that they defeat the world champion in a globally televised event in Korea.

 

The reinforced learning technique used for GO was then used to detect the shapes of proteins using their Alpha Fold model. This innovation is hugely important in the drug discovery process, so much so that Hassabis along with his colleague John Jumper win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2024.

 

One of Hassabis’ colleagues at Deep Mind was Mustapha Sulayman, another immigrant son from North London. Sulayman was very concerned about AI safety, so much so that Google delayed releasing its early AI models to the public. After an intital misstep, Google's Gemini has become a world beater. However, when Open AI released ChatGPT, the competitive juices began flowing and the safety issues were put on the back burner. Ultimately Sulayman ended up heading Microsoft’s AI efforts. In a strange quirk of history, we now two immigrant children from North London running the AI efforts of two of the major players in the field.

 

Mallaby hardly mentions Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, which is fast becoming an industry leader. Amodei was at OpenAI and then left to form his own company. Anthropic is the developer of Claude which is fast becoming the AI model of choice in the enterprise. My guess is that Mallaby did not have the time to interview or understood the significance of Amodei in the AI race. That aside Mallaby has written an important book on what is becoming a revolution in how we approach the world around us.

My Amazon Review of Jeffrey Orens' "The Soul of Genius: Marie Curie, Albert Einstein......."

 

The Rise of the New Physics

 

In 1911 Ernest Solvay the founder of Solvay S.A., then the largest chemical company in the world as a result of its new soda ash process, convened a conference of the world’s leading physicists in Brussels. Solvay was long interested in physics and theorized that energy and mass were inter-related. The idea of the conference came from German physicist Walter Nernst and it continues to this day at three year intervals with the 1927 conference being the most memorable for for its contents and participants.

 

In this book retired Solvay chemical engineer/manager Jeffrey Orens tells the story of the conference and its attendees, most notably Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. The purpose of the conference was to deal with the failure of classical physics to deal with the new world of quantum mechanics. To Orens the conference was Einstein’s coming out party because although his four path breaking papers came out in 1905, few scientists actually knew him personally. Thus, it was in Brussels where the scientific community recognized his true genius and he was soon off to a high post in Berlin, not bad for a lowly patent clerk in Bern.

 

Orens spends a good part of his book on the life of Marie Curie and how as a Polish émigré in Paris she would go on to win Nobel Prizes in physics in chemistry. The former for the discovery of radiation and the latter for isolating radium. She puts up with the rankest of sexism as the French scientific establishment fails to accept that women can do science.

 

The sexism comes to its head during the Solvay Conference where Curie is accused of having an affair her longtime married colleague Paul Langevin. Had she been a man, far from the affair being on the front pages of the tabloids, it would have largely been unnoticed. The couple loved each other, but it wasn’t to be. However, their grandchildren would later marry.

 

For a chemical engineer Orens tells a good story and it is worthy entry to the history of science.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Rise of the New Physics (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Michael Lewis' "The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds"

How Two Israeli Psychologists Changed Economics

In March 1979 two Israeli psychologists published an article entitled “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk” in Econometrica, one of the most prestigious economics journals. That widely cited article established the underpinnings of what became to be known as behavioral economics. Bestselling author Michael Lewis lovingly tells the story of the decades long friendship and intellectual collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Kahneman would go on to win the Noble Prize in economics in 2002 for their joint work; Tversky being ineligible because he died prematurely in 1996 of cancer.

Lewis is at his best when he discusses their distinct personalities. Kahneman is an introvert and a pessimist. Tversky, on the other hand, is an extrovert and optimist, yet they work together. They also go to war together in 1967 and 1973 to defend the Israeli state. In fact it is their experience in Israeli society in both peace and war enable them to see the world more clearly. They did not live as all too many American academics in cloistered cocoons. They are of the world and see the world as it is and not as theory says it should be.

What Khaneman and Tversky do is to convincingly demonstrate that human beings do not always act as rational economic agents as economic theory would suggest and that individual errors do not necessarily cancel out. They suggest that all too many times individuals underestimate uncertainty by using short form rules of thumb, heuristics in their words. Kahneman would later write a bestseller entitled “Thinking, Fast and Slow” based on this premise. In contrast people sometimes overweight low probability events. It is for this reason the same person might by an insurance policy and a lottery ticket on the same day by over-estimating the likelihood of both winning the lottery and their house burning down. Remember the expected value of both the lottery ticket and the insurance policy is negative.

Lewis opens his book by discussing how Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team uses the principles of behavioral economics in selecting players. This is an obvious follow on from his bestselling book “Moneyball” on the role of data in baseball. Only after writing that book did Lewis realize that what he was really writing about was the work of Khaneman and Tversky making it the genesis of this book. Lewis goes on to discuss, in a very real and personal way, the role of behavioral economics in medicine and government. I know I haven’t done justice to the emotional interplay between Tversky and Khaneman and their families that makes the book more than a history of their work. I will leave that to the reader. “The Undoing Project:….” is well worth the read and I highly recommend it.

The Complete Amazon URL can be found at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R25ETXKDJ0NDTU/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B01GI6S7EK

Tom Friedman's Best Column, Ever

Tom Friedman rightly responded to the Nobel committee's bizarre awarding the Peace Prize to Barack Obama by, in effect, nominating the American soldier as the most important peacekeeper of the last century. I can't do justice to his column, "The Peace (Keepers) Prize," so here is the direct weblink. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/opinion/11friedman.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=thomas%20l.%20friedman&st=cse