I joined DeepMind in 2017 and I remember in my first conversation with my manager, he described to me that he thought Demis's most brilliant move was NOT relocating to Silicon Valley.
Demis's decision meant that for a 5-7 year period, every senior AI researcher in Europe who wanted to join one of the new/big AGI labs... but didn't want to be 5000 miles away from their home/family/culture... joined DeepMind.
There was *very* little competition for talent for an incredibly long period of time... and very high retention. There was a meme that "basically nobody has quit DeepMind yet". I remember 20 people joining/week. There was a pizza party every friday where they rang a gong and you met all these famous researchers.
If AI labs are mostly a competition for data, compute, and talent (and the rest is mostly the stochastic nature of research), Demis's opening moves here were briliant:
2010ish... Data: he had the idea to use videogames to generate infinite amounts of training data for specific tasks. Atara, Go, etc. came out of this.
2014ish... Compute: He used his data advantage to create the impressive Atari demonstration (and then i'm sure many other tactical strategies) to get acquired by Google... giving him an instant, sustainable compute advantage
2014ish... Talent: Post acquisition, he refused to relocate the team to SV... unlocking the massive talent advantage described above. It also meant he got the talent cheaper (while the other labs fought over talent with money... DeepMind got top talent at a discount b/c of location. At the time salaries were lower at DM than Facebook or OpenAI).
And if you look at the rise of OpenAI, in particular around GPT-1, GPT-2, ... it included a data acquisition strategy that wasn't an option for DeepMind (I was on the language team at the time... it wasn't an option). This high-risk strategy produced very impressive models.... forming a particular kind of data disadvantage for firms with less risk-on data acquisition strategies.
Then the other labs also built offices across the street from DeepMind, and the geography-based aspect talent advantage expired (DeepMind still has many great talent strategies).
And of course... plenty of compute buildout ensued across many labs... and things balanced out to the competitive landscape that exists today. (According to Epoch's recent report... Google still has more compute than anyone though)
It's a complex time. AI is a crazy space. But Demis is a master strategist, and those opening moves were both counter to the conventional wisdom and absolutely brilliant.