VIFF 2024 Review: The Thinking Game
The Thinking Game (2024)
Directed by Greg Kohs
As seen at the film’s Canadian Premiere at the Vancounver International Film Festival (VIFF).
Today, at International Village Theatres in Vancouver, you have the chance to catch a decade-spanning documentary that might just clue you in on the most important aspiration humanity has ever seen. Hyperbole? Maybe. But after sitting through this 90-minute film, which tracks Demis Hassabis’ journey from a wunderkind to the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, you might think otherwise.
The Thinking Game is the perfect crash course on AI—the kind we all need to understand what could very well be our collective future. Still, not everyone will find it entertaining enough to seek it out. I implore you to give it a chance, even if you find chess boring or have no idea what the 3,000-year-old game Go is. The film presents its information in such a way that, once you see it as a human story rather than a tale about machines, you’ll breeze through it, realizing that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is inevitable—probably within your lifetime.
There’s no fearmongering here, nor is it blindly optimistic. Instead, it strikes a good balance—much like the balance Hassabis himself shows between ambition and practicality. The only stumble is when it tries to be something it’s not: entertaining. A well-crafted but out-of-place animated sequence recounting Hassabis’ past feels like it belongs in a different film, one with fewer TED Talk vibes. But despite that, even dummies like myself will walk away feeling like we’ve been on a bit of an adventure, armed with new knowledge about the looming reality of AGI.
Friday, Oct. 4, 1:00 p.m. at International Village 10