I did raise an eyebrow at it too, but I doubt his contribution was entirely “management of resources”.
I think one must also give him the credit for the vision, risk taking and drive to apply the resources at his disposal, and RL, to these particular problems.
Without that push this research would never have been done, but there may have been many fungible people willing to iron out the details (and, to be fair, contribute some important ideas along the way).
I’m not a proponent of the “great man” theory of history, but based on the above I can see that this could be fair (although I have no way of telling if internally this is actually how it played out).
Agree. Hassabis is more than a manager. He did start DeepMind with just a few people and was a big part of the brains behind it.
Now that it has grown he might be doing more management. But the groundwork that went into AlphaFold was built on all the earlier Alphaxxx things they have built, and he contributed.
It isn't like other big tech managers that just got some new thing dumped in their lap. He did start off building this.
I think one must also give him the credit for the vision, risk taking and drive to apply the resources at his disposal, and RL, to these particular problems.
Without that push this research would never have been done, but there may have been many fungible people willing to iron out the details (and, to be fair, contribute some important ideas along the way).
I’m not a proponent of the “great man” theory of history, but based on the above I can see that this could be fair (although I have no way of telling if internally this is actually how it played out).