With the year winding down and my inbox now filled with out-of-office replies, I thought this week’s Nightcrawler was a good excuse to recommend a couple of feature-length documentaries.

The first is The Thinking Game (free on YouTube) — a five-year portrait of Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. On one level, it’s a fascinating account of how a small group of researchers pushed the limits of artificial intelligence and produced genuine breakthroughs.

Beneath the surface, the film is really about long-term thinking. AI can feel like it appeared out of nowhere sometime around 2022. This documentary shows how misleading that impression is. The real story began much earlier — with years of false starts, doubt, and incremental advances that rarely made headlines. When DeepMind’s breakthroughs finally arrive, they are the result of a few individuals who refused to abandon a problem that had defeated scientists for half a century.

Key quote: “My view is that the approach to building technology, which is embodied by move fast and break things, is exactly what we should not be doing. Because you can’t afford to break things and then fix them afterwards.”

Real journalism in an era of fake news and misinformation

The second documentary that I recently enjoyed was Turn Every Page (available on Amazon Prime), a story about the creative relationship between Robert Caro (author of The Power Broker) and his long-time editor, Robert Gottlieb.

Like The Thinking Game, the film operates on multiple levels. On the surface, it chronicles a complex, sometimes fraught, 50-year partnership between two men devoted to telling great works of nonfiction. More fundamentally, it serves as a kind of meditation on the need for deep, investigative journalism in a world where that feels increasingly rare.

Key quote: “People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start, I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times — particularly the force that is political power.”

A few more links I enjoyed:

Is the Tao smarter than the Dow? – via Tom Morgan [Special thanks to Tom for giving me a very kind shoutout here.]

Key quote: “‍Individual investors and traders who consistently believe they’re smarter than the collective human intelligence of the market often end up in deep trouble. Societies that believe the collective human intelligence of the market is smarter than the Tao seem destined to do the same…. More broadly, I’m curious if win-win businesses can survive and thrive in an economy that’s becoming increasingly win-lose. So a core question I wrestle with in my work is: is the Tao smarter than the Dow?”

Sustaining Institutions in a World Focused on Short-term Performance – via Wendell Weeks

Key quote: “Dominic Barton has called for a shift from quarterly capitalism to long-term capitalism. He argues that focusing on quarterly earnings is not the right way to assess a business’s value to shareholders, much less its value to society. I agree, and believe that the focus on quarterly earnings is pressuring executives to focus on incremental product improvements and rapid pay-offs, while under-investing in the big, disruptive innovations that drive growth and increase productivity. Now, Dominic and others have spoken far more eloquently than I can on what this means from a capital investment perspective. So I’ll share my thoughts about what it means from a broader perspective. But let me anticipate some concerns and say what it does not mean.”

This article The inside story of DeepMind is featured on Big Think.