I was curious about the paper Hassabis wrote that had replication problems. It appears the paper disputing it is this one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140124/
This neural code is sparse and distributed, theoretically rendering it undetectable with population recording methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Existing studies nonetheless report decoding spatial codes in the human hippocampus using such techniques. Here we present results from a virtual navigation experiment in humans in which we eliminated visual- and path-related confounds and statistical limitations present in existing studies, ensuring that any positive decoding results would represent a voxel-place code. Consistent with theoretical arguments derived from electrophysiological data and contrary to existing fMRI studies, our results show that although participants were fully oriented during the navigation task, there was no statistical evidence for a place code.
Seems though, that his PhD thesis paper is not the only one that reported finding evidence of a place code, but that all studies had failed to account for confounding variables (or so it's claimed).
edit: To investigate this possibility, we repeated the analysis of Hassabis et al. (2009) on pure noise. [snip] If searchlight overlaps per se do not make a significant contribution to the correlation in searchlight accuracies, then there should be ∼5% false positives (by setting p 50% false positives in all ROI contrasts
Ouch. Not sure it really means much in the end, but I guess we should be wary of people who pump up the stories of supposed genius. I've noticed before that journalists struggle to resist 'child genius' stories that fall apart when investigated.
The exploits of DeepMind speak for themselves so he has nothing to prove at this point, but I noticed that the article claims he single handedly wrote Theme Park (which was mostly designed and written by Peter Molyneux).
And of course Elixir was a flop. Republic is described in the article as an "intricate political simulation" but by Wikipedia like this:
As a strategy game, the 3D game engine is mostly a facade on top of simpler rules and mechanics reminiscent of a boardgame
Reminiscent of a board game? That seems far off a world simulator. And saying "other games were a flop" is an exaggeration - there was only one other game (the Bond Villain simulataor). All this is something the article quite surprisingly just blows off as "he wanted to learn management". Really? The best way to learn management would be to become a manager at a successful company, I'd have thought.
I don't know Hassabis but what I know I like. He's trying to do bold and ambitious things, and has been a part of successful British companies as well as unsuccessful ones. He's contributed to science, and if his paper had flaws, well, welcome to the club, apparently many do. He comes across as clever but humble. I'd happily work with him any day.
But in the end I feel like unalloyed reports of genius in the press always end up coming back to earth when studied closely. Journalists should be more skeptical.