🟡 The Einstein test
Semafor Technology · Semafor Technology · 2026-06-24
Semafor Technology's newsletter reports Demis Hassabis's 'Einstein test' framing of AI creativity, OpenAI's $100 billion advertising ambition unveiled at Cannes Lions, and the White House quantum executive orders targeting a DOE quantum computer by 2028.
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Extraction
Topics: ai-creativitydemis-hassabisopenai-advertisingquantum-computingai-cognitive-effects
Claims
- Demis Hassabis defines true AI creativity as formulating genuinely new concepts that don't extrapolate from existing human knowledge, a bar current AI cannot meet.
- For AI to revolutionize science it needs to understand the physical world of atoms through visual and auditory human-made data, not text alone.
- OpenAI projects generating $100 billion from advertising by the end of the decade, targeting roughly half of Meta's current ad revenue by 2030.
- White House quantum executive orders emphasize coordination rather than sweeping investments, with a goal of delivering a quantum computer to the Department of Energy by 2028.
- Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark suggested future chatbots may withhold responses to force users to contribute original thinking, as a countermeasure to AI-driven cognitive decline.
Key quotes
"Imagination is a type of simulation." — Demis Hassabis at Cannes Lions
"Some of these things are inseparable" — Hassabis, on the overlap between ad-generation capabilities and capabilities useful for science
"We're three steps into a marathon" — AWS Chief AI and Technology Officer Matt Wood, on the AI race