The Thinking Game

Director: Greg Kohs

Friend of foe the scientists behind Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Sir Demis Hassabis and John Jumper are the subject of their self-propelled documentary The Thinking Game directed by Greg Kohs. A research rather than tech company focused approach is the key to their success which started in 2010 with the establishment of their company DeepMind where they taught a computer to learn by playing basic video games by itself. Selling their firm to Google a few years later, the scale-up is the primary focus of Kohs’ film, an engaging exploration of the human origins and purpose of a little start-up that has ended up changing the tech industry on a major scale.

This is a very British story, Hassabis who went on to create AI-focused computer games including Theme Park, refused to go to Silicon Valley and chose to stay in London to develop their vision. His history as a childhood chess champion in the UK and then determination to go to Cambridge even after creating a multi-million company is a continual focus for the film in which Hassabis connects his life’s work on AI to every aspect of his development. And this process using gaming as a basis to prove algorithms that his firm DeepMind can then applying them to wider societal and research challenges is well explained.

AGI will divide civilisation into 2 parts, before and after, it will be that transformative the talking heads including respected international scientists claim, following DeepMind over a five-year period in which the possibilities for the application of AI become greater and greater. The distinction between AI and AGI is well explained, the creation of computers that can think broadly rather than apply themselves to single problems, and the film follows Hassabis and Jumper as they apply their technology to beating human chess champions and later supporting scientific discovery.

The examples are clear – first learning how to play Pong, the basic tennis game in which the computer eventually teaches itself. Later the team explain the transition to self-acquisition of knowledge when they switch from feeding human examples of game playing into their AI to putting in the computer’s own experience, from which it can enhance its own skills. This process of self-learning is something the film issues muted warnings about with even Hassabis noting that AGI will need to be controlled and selectively managed to prevent its misuse.

But this is ultimately a celebratory film, building up to the solving of a major issue in modern biology which, though complicated – you may not understand why protein folding is so important at the end – is something only AI achieves, winning its creators a Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The real win though is the decision to release the programme (AlphaFold) via Open Source, allowing scientists around the world to apply it to studies of major diseases.

Much has been written about AI in the last few years and great fear still exists about its role in modern life, but Kohs’ film sees beyond the fears of control and the possibility that the knowledge it self-generates at speed can solve some major scientific challenges.

The Thinking Game is in cinemas from 21 March.