The Thinking Game review – DeepMind study offers wide-lens view of our tech lords and AGI

Director Greg Kohs uses every tool in the editing palette to explain how Artificial General Intelligence (as differentiated from Artificial Intelligence) works

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.