On the front cover of their initial business plan for DeepMind, the AI lab they set up in 2010, Sir Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg wrote a single sentence: Build the world’s first artificial general intelligence.Their view, which remains true today, is that traditional AI technologies were too “narrow”, able to perform brilliantly, but only after humans had laboriously trained them using vast data sets. That made AI excellent at tasks such as analysing spreadsheets or even playi...