I’ve at all times been serious about power, politics, and so forth. You realize, human rights principles are mainly trade-offs, a continuing ongoing negotiation between all these different conflicting tensions. I could see that humans were wrestling with that—we’re stuffed with our own biases and blind spots. Activist work, local, national, international government, et cetera—it’s all just slow and inefficient and fallible.

Imagine for those who didn’t have human fallibility. I feel it’s possible to construct AIs that actually reflect our greatest collective selves and can ultimately make higher trade-offs, more consistently and more fairly, on our behalf.

And that’s still what motivates you?

I mean, in fact, after DeepMind I never needed to work again. I actually didn’t have to put in writing a book or anything like that. Money has never ever been the motivation. It’s at all times, you understand, just been a side effect.

For me, the goal has never been anything but the way to do good on the earth and the way to move the world forward in a healthy, satisfying way. Even back in 2009, after I began taking a look at entering into technology, I could see that AI represented a good and accurate option to deliver services on the earth.

I can’t help pondering that it was easier to say that form of thing 10 or 15 years ago, before we’d seen lots of the downsides of the technology. How are you able to keep up your optimism?

I feel that we’re obsessive about whether you’re an optimist or whether you’re a pessimist. This can be a completely biased way of taking a look at things. I don’t need to be either. I need to coldly stare within the face of the advantages and the threats. And from where I stand, we are able to very clearly see that with every step up in the dimensions of those large language models, they get more controllable.

So two years ago, the conversation—wrongly, I assumed on the time—was “Oh, they’re just going to supply toxic, regurgitated, biased, racist screeds.” I used to be like, it is a snapshot in time. I feel that what people lose sight of is the progression 12 months after 12 months, and the trajectory of that progression.