If you don’t follow science news much, you may only be aware of Artificial Intelligence as a new-fangled thingy that somehow makes TikToks of kittens singing versions of Don’t You Want Me Like I Want You Baby in an ickle kid voice. If that’s your level of engagement with AI, then this competent, fluent documentary offers a very approachable entry into the subject. It’s not, however, a wide-lens overview of the subject but a character-driven study of one specific, key-player company in the industry: DeepMind, whose intercapped name betrays its origins in the 2010 tech-boom era.
As it happens, DeepMind is now officially called Google DeepMind and is part of a suite of divisions developing robotics and solving problems using AI – sorry, AGI because it’s not just Artificial Intelligence we’re talking about here, but Artificial General Intelligence (it gets explained). The fact that Google and its tech overlords are involved, however amiable they seem when seen in their office casual dress (former CEO Eric Schmidt at least), means this has more than a little flavour of corporate video, investor-fluffing, and self-congratulatory smugness about it. But DeepMind’s British founder and CEO Demis Hassabis manages to come across as a pretty nice guy with a genuinely interesting backstory. The son of a Greek father and a Singaporean mother raised in London, he was a child chess prodigy who became a video game designer; instead, he opted to go into a purer form of research on how thinking itself works, and that became his business.
All this leads up to a satisfyingly climactic achievement for Hassabis that viewers who read science news may know from recent headlines. And what he and his collaborator John Jumper achieved with their AI model AlphaFold, a program that predicts the structure of proteins based on chemical sequence, is truly remarkable. Director Greg Kohs uses animation and all the tools in the video editing toolbox to explain the science in crystal clear layperson’s terms, which in itself is no mean feat. But it’s hard not to feel there’s a few dimensions to the AGI story that are being left in the desktop recycling bin.
• The Thinking Game is in UK cinemas from 21 March.
