Demis Hassabis prefers gaming over acid trips.
The Google DeepMind CEO said he’s never taken LSD and doesn’t want to. In a recent interview with Wired’s Steven Levy, the AI boss was asked about his pursuit of understanding the “nature of reality,” as his X bio states.
More specifically, Hassabis was asked if acid had ever helped him get a glimpse of the nature of reality. The short answer is no.
“I didn’t do it like that,” Hassabis said. “I just did it through my gaming and reading a hell of a lot when I was a kid, both science fiction and science.”
Hassabis set out as a child to understand the universe better, and the quest is ongoing. He’s hoping AI and, eventually, artificial general intelligence will help reach his goal. While some tech leaders have talked about using psychedelics, Hassabis said he’s “too worried about the effects on the brain.”
“I’ve sort of finely tuned my mind to work in this way,” he said. “I need it for where I’m going.”
Google DeepMind is the research lab behind the company’s AI projects, including chatbot Gemini. Hassabis is leading Google’s charge toward the AI race’s holy grail — AGI.
Google DeepMind didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Over the years, Silicon Valley has embraced the use of psychedelics, such as microdosing to improve productivity or going on ayahuasca retreats. Some investors have banked on their popularity, backing psychedelic startups that are seeking to turn the drugs into medical treatments or expand the industry in other ways.
However, that’s not a green light to take acid or magic mushrooms on the clock. In 2021, CEO Justin Zhu, cofounder and CEO of a startup called Iterable, said he was fired for microdosing LSD before a meeting. He hoped it would improve his focus, he said.
Some of Hassabis’s tech peers have been open about using LSD as established bosses or as college students. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, for example, took acid for the first time as a teenager, according to his memoir, “Source Code: My Beginnings.”
For Gates, dropping acid was exhilarating at first and a “cosmic” experience when he did it again. However, he ended up thinking his brain could delete his memories like a computer.
“That would be one of the last times I would do LSD,” Gates said.
It didn’t have that effect on Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that it was “a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.”
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has also spoken positively about his experience with psychedelics. Although he didn’t specify exactly what drug he took, he said it changed him from a “very anxious, unhappy person” to “calm.”
“If you had told me that, like, one weekend-long retreat in Mexico was going to significantly change that, I would have said absolutely not,” Altman said. “And it really did.”
For Hassabis, he’s seeking other ways to find answers to life’s deepest questions.
“We don’t know what the nature of time is, or consciousness and reality,” he told Wired. “I don’t understand why people don’t think about them more. I mean, this is staring us in the face.”
