Luke McShane

Knights before bishops

issue 13 February 2021

In 2005 Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford University. The late Apple CEO kicked off with a story about a calligraphy course he took after dropping out of college in the 1970s. He was fascinated by the artistry of it, but what seemed like a whim of idle curiosity found a practical application ten years later when it came to designing typography for the Mac.

Jobs’s tale of resurgent aesthetic ideas came to mind when I read an interview which Demis Hassabis, the CEO of artificial intelligence company DeepMind, gave to the Times last year. Hassabis is a brilliant technologist, but while growing up he was also one of the top-ranked junior chess players at international level. Winning five ‘Pentamind’ titles at the Mind Sports Olympiad further attests to his profound interest in strategy games, as does the fact that early in his career he co-designed the computer game Theme Park, which sold 15 million copies.

When DeepMind was still a fledgling company, Hassabis knew that he might get just a brief minute to pitch his company to the billionaire American investor Peter Thiel.

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