The Thinking Game
Documentary about DeepMind, AGI and Demis Hassabis
Source
Book cube
Film review from Alexander Polomodov
What is this movie about?
"The Thinking Game" is a documentary film produced over five years by the same team that won acclaim for "AlphaGo." The film immerses the viewer in the real atmosphere of the London DeepMind laboratory and shows how the team works on AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
The title of the film echoes "The Imitation Game" about Alan Turing and his classic article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". But if the film about Turing is only based on real events, then “The Thinking Game” is completely documentary, with real scientists and stories.
The film combines the narrative of DeepMind's scientific breakthroughs with biographical elements Demis Hassabis — his childhood passion for chess and video games, winning tournaments and becoming a programmer. These personal stories are intertwined with the company's history, demonstrating how a youthful passion grew into an ambitious project to create intelligent algorithms.
Related topic
AI Engineering
Chip Huyen on creating AI applications: foundation models, agents, finetuning
Key people in the film
Demis Hassabis
Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind. The central figure of the film - the entire plot revolves around him.
Shane Legg
Co-founder of DeepMind and longtime colleague of Hassabis. Recalls the start of the company.
David Silver
Lead developer of the AlphaGo program, the system that defeated the world champion in Go.
John Jumper
Lead of the AlphaFold project. Shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2024 with Demis.
Eric Schmidt
Former CEO of Google. Covers Google's connection with DeepMind and the significance of their developments.
Stuart Russell
Renowned AI expert and co-author of the classic AI textbook (with Peter Norvig).
Key moments of the film
🚀 Creation of DeepMind (2010)
The company was founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleiman with the ambitious goal of creating artificial general intelligence.
💰 Google purchase (2014)
Google acquires DeepMind for $400 million. From that moment on, the company gained access to enormous computing resources for research.
🎮 Breakthroughs in games: AlphaGo and AlphaZero
AlphaGo beat world champion Lee Sedol in 2016 and Chinese champion Ke Jie in 2017. The match was broadcast live in China, but the broadcast was interrupted when the computer won. AlphaGo Zero has already trained without data from human batches.
Breakthroughs in Science: AlphaFold (Nobel Prize 2024)
The film covers in detail the AlphaFold project - predicting the spatial structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. This problem, which scientists have been struggling with for decades, has been solved. Demis and John Jumper received the Nobel Prize for AlphaFold.
After the movie: AlphaEvolve (2025)
The film was released on film festival screens in 2024, so there is no further story mentioned in it. Already in 2025, a continuation of the team’s research was published - AlphaEvolve — an agent for solving optimization problems through writing code.
The review was prepared based on the material Alexandra Polomodova