The Thinking Game
Greg Kohs' measured documentary takes an informative look at Britain’s contribution to AI.
Image courtesy of Dartmouth Films.
Greg Kohs who directed and photographed The Thinking Game has done a good job here. His documentary is concerned with a major subject of our times, Artificial General Intelligence, and its aims in that respect are very clear-cut. There are scenes in the film that raise the alarming question of the abuse that could come about when the role of AI becomes such a key feature of our world, a time which may well be nearer than many would suppose. But The Thinking Game is not entering into a debate centred on that since what it sets out to do is to look back on the research and development in this sphere over the past decade or so. In doing so the film concentrates on the work done in England and the central figure is Sir Demis Hassabis – indeed his funding together with others of the software company and research laboratory DeepMind in 2010 is in effect the film’s starting-off point.
Hassabis, who was the son of a Greek Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother, was born in London in 1976 and his remarkable intelligence manifested itself early on when he displayed his expertise at chess taking part in tournaments abroad at the age of twelve. But he turned away from that looking for something which had a wider purpose and, having acquired a place at Cambridge but being too young to take it up immediately, he filled in the interim working in the field of video games. Far from this being a frivolous sideline, his experience in producing them would pave the way to using games for research in a manner that made him a visionary scientist. He had made friends in Cambridge who would join him in DeepMind in order to learn more about the potential of AI. By 2016 they were working on AlphaGo and here the intricate Japanese board game of Go became a field in which a computer program that they had developed could take on a champion of the game, Lee Sedol, in a match in Seoul and defeat him.
However, in a way that does not demand any specialist knowledge on the part of the viewer, the film makes clear how this work was a stepping stone leading to a long period devoted to developing a more elaborate program known as AlphaFold. The aim was to create Artificial General Intelligence in its widest sense so that one could have a machine capable of developed thinking of its own and thus be able to find answers to problems that man has failed to solve. When talking of building AGI in this way Hassabis describes this as being the most exciting journey that humans have ever embarked on. His specific hope was that AGI would in time be able to come up with predictions of folding protein structures which have presented a challenge to biologists for over fifty years. He would have setbacks en route but would eventually succeed: one does not need to understand the process since it suffices to recognise the breakthrough inherent in creating a provider of fresh and fast information in fields which as a pathway to solving problems both environmental and medical will benefit the world. He and Dr. John Jumper were in consequence made Nobel Prize laureates in 2024.
If The Thinking Game essentially follows through the various processes leading to this achievement, it also finds variety by breaking off on occasion to tell us a bit more about Hassabis himself – there is footage from his chess-playing days, discussion of his time with the video game developer Bullfrog Productions and recollections of his Cambridge years. But, while this biographical element is welcome, it is never the focal point. Filmed over five years, The Thinking Game may have at its centre this man who is a fellow of the Royal Society, an adviser to the UK government regarding AI and someone who in 2017 received a CBE but its central concern is always the work done by him and his colleagues. It comes across as an honest account that never descends to being propagandist although Hassabis clearly believes in AGI and its potential for good. He is a fine advocate for that view.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, Ben Coppin, Margaret Levi, Eric Schmidt, David Silver, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Kenneth Cukier, John Jumper, Costas Hassabis, Angela Hassabis, Murray Shanahan.
Dir Greg Kohs, Pro Gary Krieg and Tara Struthers, Ph Greg Kohs, Ed Steven Sandler, Music Dan Deacon.
Reel As Dirt/Cityspeak Films/Across the Road-Dartmouth Films.
84 mins. USA. 2024. UK Rel: 21 March 2025. Cert. 12A.
