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Training Data · 2 min · Apr 29, 2026

Elixir taught Hassabis to aim five years ahead, not 50

Demis Hassabis explains how Elixir’s Republic project pushed country-scale simulation onto late-1990s home PCs. He learned to aim for a five-year lead, not a 50-year one.

Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis is cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind.

  • KB

    Konstantine Buhler, Host · Partner, Sequoia

About this segment

Demis Hassabis explains how Elixir’s Republic project pushed country-scale simulation onto late-1990s home PCs. He learned to aim for a five-year lead, not a 50-year one.

From “Demis Hassabis: We're Three Quarters of the Way to AGI”, Apr 29, 2026. Watch the full episode

“you want to be five years ahead of your time, not 50 years ahead.”
Demis Hassabisat 3:44 · Training Data3:44

Takeaways

  1. Republic simulated a country and living cities on home PCs.
  2. Simulating a million people made the project highly ambitious.
  3. He uses a five-year lead as a target, not a 50-year one.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 4:35DeepMind bet on combining deep learning and reinforcement learning2:51
  2. 9:01AI could shrink drug discovery from years to weeks3:46
  3. 12:40AI simulations could make social sciences more experimental4:41

  4. 2:48Elixir taught Hassabis to aim five years ahead, not 501:53

  5. 17:25Hassabis sees information as more fundamental than matter or energy3:06Up next
  6. 20:26Hassabis wants useful AI tools before machine consciousness3:10

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 2:52

    So we've got a room full of founders here. And you can relate because you're a founder not just once, but twice. Take us back to the first time. Elixir Studios. What was that like? It's not the startup that you're most known for, but it was one that you had incredible success with. How did you lead that and what did it teach you about building? Well, look, I started Elixir Studios straight out of college, and I was lucky enough to work at Bullfrog Productions, which, for those of you who know games, it was a kind of legendary game studio in the early days of the game industry, probably the best one in Europe.

  2. 3:27

    and I wanted to do something that combined, pushed AI. So effectively, I was funding AI back in those days through the backdoor, through games development, and then push the forefront of that and combine it with cutting edge creativity. And I think that's still relevant today with the way we do our blue sky research. But maybe the biggest lesson I learned was you want to be five years ahead of your time, not 50 years ahead.

  3. 3:53

    So we tried to do a game called Republic at Elixir Studios, which simulated a whole country and then the idea of the game is you could sort of um overthrow I think there was a dictator in charge of the country in any number of different ways and we basically simulated living breathing cities and this is bearing in mind this is like the late 90s on a Pentium so we had to get all the graphics and all the AI for a million people um working on uh you know a home PC at the time so it was a little bit ambitious and um uh and maybe it was too ambitious, and it caused some issues.

  4. 4:27

    And I took that lesson with me of, like, you want to be ahead of your time. You don't want to be, obviously, when it's obvious to everyone, it's too late. But if you're 50 years ahead, then there's probably no way you can get it to be successful.