Demis Hassabis — co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and one of the world's top AI pioneers — tells me that the technology's coming power has been clear for so long that he's amazed the rest of the world took so long to catch on.

• "I've been thinking about this for decades. It was so obvious to me this was the biggest thing," Hassabis, 48, told Axios in a virtual interview from London, where DeepMind is based.
• "Obviously I didn't know it could be done in my lifetime.
• ... Even 15 years ago when we started DeepMind, still nobody was working on it, really."

Why it matters: AI clocked a Nobel moment earlier this month when Hassabis and a DeepMind colleague, John Jumper, were part of a joint Nobel Prize in chemistry — and the Nobel in physics went to Geoffrey Hinton, the "godfather of AI," and machine-learning trailblazer John Hopfield.

• "Maybe it's a watershed moment for AI that it's now mature enough, and it's advanced enough, that it can really help with scientific discovery," Hassabis said.
• "We don't have to wait," he said, for artificial general intelligence (AGI) — systems that can outsmart humans, the holy grail for AI developers. AI can already "revolutionize drug discovery," he added.

🖼️ The big picture: Hassabis said AI may be "overhyped in the near term" because of the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has fueled a frenzy among investors. He voiced a view shared by many big-name researchers who spent years working slowly and deeply, out of the spotlight, to make the present era possible. "I'd rather it would have stayed more of a scientific level," he said. "But it's become too popular for that."

• He thinks AI is "still massively underrated in the long term": "People still don't really understand what I've lived with and sat with for 30 years."

Between the lines: Hassabis has moved into the driver's seat for Google's total AI efforts, with other teams being consolidated under DeepMind, as Axios' Ina Fried reported last week.

• DeepMind co-founders now run AI at both Google and Microsoft. Mustafa Suleyman, another DeepMind co-founder, in March became CEO of Microsoft AI, leading Copilot and consumer AI.

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Hassabis started playing chess when he was 4, after watching his father and an uncle. "But they're not good chess players, so I was beating them within a couple of weeks," he recalls. Hassabis became captain of English youth chess teams, when England was second only to Russia.

• He says he wrote his first AI program when he was about 11, to help play the strategy board game Othello (Reversi). He then led the chess team at Cambridge, where he got top honors in computer science, before earning a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at University College London.

🔭 Zoom out: Hassabis, who read lots of science fiction growing up, told Axios he was "always interested in the big questions" — which often leads to a life in physics. But even back then, he sensed there was something bigger.

• "Physics was my favorite subject," he said. "If you want to understand the fabric of reality or the nature of time or any of these big questions or just the universe, you study physics. But I felt that having read about all the physics greats ... we were lacking some tools to tackle such momentous questions."

Along the way, even his own professors were skeptical about Hassabis' AI passion — especially about pursuing it in the private sector rather than academia.

• "I never cared about that," he recalled. I was going to do this no matter what."

The bottom line: Hassabis marvels at viewing Earth from a 747, or talking on Zoom 3,000 miles apart — both products of the human mind.

• "So if we could create that [intelligence] artificially and make that abundant and have even super-intelligence ... that would change the whole world," he said. "So it seems an obvious logical progression. It's sort of surprising to me that more people haven't realized that a lot earlier."

Share this story ... Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg contributed.

• Go deeper: The era of AI agents is just getting started, by Axios' Ina Fried.

Israel gave the U.S. a document last week with its conditions for a diplomatic solution to end the war in Lebanon and allow displaced civilians from both sides of the border to return to their homes, two U.S. officials and two Israeli officials told Axios' Barak Ravid.

• Why it matters: The Israeli Prime Minister's Office gave the paper to the White House ahead of a visit by President Biden's envoy to Beirut today to discuss a diplomatic solution to the conflict, Israeli officials said.

Behind the scenes: One Israeli demand is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) be allowed to engage in "active enforcement" to make sure Hezbollah doesn't rearm and rebuild its military infrastructure in the areas of southern Lebanon that are close to the border, an Israeli official said.

• The official added that Israel also demands its air force have freedom of operation in Lebanese air space.

Last night, the Israeli Air Force conducted airstrikes across Lebanon against dozens of targets affiliated with Hezbollah's bank, including a building in Beirut, the IDF said.

• An Israeli intelligence official told reporters the Hezbollah bank received hundreds of millions of dollars from Iran annually.

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Former President Trump — famed fan of fast food — manned the fry station yesterday at a McDonald's in suburban Philly that was closed to the public.

• "It requires great expertise, actually, to do it right and to do it fast," Trump said, putting away his suit jacket and wearing an apron over his shirt and tie.

A huge crowd lined the street outside the restaurant in Bucks County, a key swing voter area north of Philadelphia.

• After serving bags of takeout to people in the drive-thru lane, Trump leaned out of the window to take questions from reporters staged outside.

Go deeper ... McDonald's internal message: Harris also invited.

Above: Vice President Harris got an assist from Stevie Wonder, who rallied congregants at a church in Jonesboro, Ga., with a rendition of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song."

• Harris will sit down for an interview tomorrow with NBC News' Hallie Jackson at the vice president's residence at the Naval Observatory.

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Judges in some of the nation's most important election battlegrounds have rejected a string of last-minute efforts by conservative and Trump-aligned groups to impose new voting rules ahead of Election Day, Axios' Erin Doherty writes.

• Why it matters: Even as courts have shot down several of these challenges, election law experts warn that the rejections could be used to promote conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Zoom in: In Georgia, a Trump-aligned majority of the state's election board passed a flurry of rules last month that included a measure to require poll workers to hand-count millions of ballots.

• Fulton County judges overturned that rule and another that would've allowed county election officials to delay certifying election results merely by citing suspicions of fraud. Republicans have appealed.

🌵 In Arizona, a federal judge blocked an effort that would have required Arizona's 15 counties to check the citizenship of every federal election-only voter.

🎰 In Nevada, a federal judge on Friday dismissed a suit by the RNC and Nevada's Republican Party challenging the state's voter rolls.

🌽 In Nebraska, the state Supreme Court said last week that the state's top election official can't block people with felony convictions from voting after they serve their sentences.

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Groups trying to elect pro-crypto candidates to Congress are set to spend $21 million more on ads to boost Republicans than they'll spend on Democrats in the run-up to the Nov. 5 election, Axios' Stef W. Kight and Brady Dale report.

• Why it matters: The industry has been cultivating lawmakers in both parties, with its main PAC — Fairshake — endorsing equal numbers of candidates on each side.
• But the tens of millions of campaign ad dollars flowing from its affiliate super PACs point to the GOP as the preferred party among the crypto set.

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is known for his stoic public face. But in private, he cried tears of joy when he broke a record he long chased: Longest-serving Senate party leader.

• Why it matters: McConnell's teary moment is one of several revealing scenes unearthed by Michael Tackett, AP's deputy Washington bureau chief, in his new McConnell biography.

"The Price of Power" — out Oct. 29, a week before Election Day — is one of Washington's biggest talkers.

• After McConnell surpassed former Sen. Mike Mansfield's (D-Mont.) record as party leader, he "burst into tears" when he received a congratulatory email, Tackett writes.

McConnell has the unique distinction of being despised by Democrats and members of his own party — but nearly universally respected for his political skills.

• Despite four decades of public life, he remains somewhat of a sphinx. Former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), a close strategic ally, told Tackett: "It was impossible to get beyond the veil."

McConnell's idea of small talk to Boehner, the House's most famous smoker, was: "I hope you're not going to light that cigarette," Boehner recalled.

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The nation's third-largest magazine by print circulation is now Costco Connection, the N.Y. Times writes.

• "Each month, 15.4 million copies of Costco Connection are mailed out to 'executive' members." 300,000 more are distributed in the company's warehouse stores.

The two largest are AARP: The Magazine and The AARP Bulletin.

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