Magic Harbor AI

At Isomorphic, Nobel Prize-winner Demis Hassabis is building AI models designed to speed up drug discovery and bring medicines to market faster. As an 8-year old, Demis Hassabis could just barely see the stars. The astonishingly prodigious child of bohemian parents, Hassabis grew up in North London in the 1980s. And through the city haze, every now and again, Hassabis could see one constellation—Orion, named for Greek mythology’s formidable hunter and for centuries a guide to sailors and farmers. Some 40 years later, it remains Hassabis’s favorite constellation, in part for its connection to the immortal: Even the ancient Egyptians venerated Orion. “First of all, it’s a bit random, these patterns of stars all lined up, as we look up from Earth,” Hassabis says. “And secondly, think about Orion’s Belt: It’s three stars that are just randomly configured. But they mean something because we are using our consciousness to interpret it.” Hassabis and I are meeting not far from where ...

In an exclusive interview, the AI pioneer shares his plans for his new Paris-based company, AMI Labs. Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry’s current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately fail to solve many pressing problems. Instead, he thinks we should be betting on world models—a different type of AI that accurately reflects the dynamics of the real world. He is also a staunch advocate for open-source AI and criticizes the closed approach of frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that he recently left Meta, where he had served as chief scientist for FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), the company's influential research lab that he founded. Meta has struggled to gain much traction with its open-source AI model Llama and has seen internal shake-ups, including the controversial acquisition of Scal...