Is information more fundamental than energy or matter? Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind

By Sequoia Capital

Categories: VC, Startup

Summary

Demis Hassabis argues information is more fundamental than energy or matter—a inversion of classical 1920s physics. This reframing positions AI not as a tool but as the primary mechanism for understanding and organizing reality itself, making it profoundly more significant than commonly perceived.

Key Takeaways

  1. Information may be convertible with energy and matter (like E=mc²), suggesting a unified framework where all three quantities are equivalent but information is primary—useful for founders building systems around data organization.
  2. Biology fundamentally resists entropy through information-processing systems, not just biochemical reactions. This lens suggests biotech and life science startups should model systems as information architecture first.
  3. AI's true power lies in information processing and organizing informational objects, not raw computation. This reframes AI development priorities away from scale toward pattern recognition and knowledge structure.
  4. The information-first worldview inverts 1920s physics assumptions, suggesting founders should question inherited mental models when building foundational technologies.
  5. Understanding the universe through information processing creates deep connections across disciplines—biology, physics, AI—enabling cross-domain pattern transfer for systems thinking.

Topics

Transcript Excerpt

You've talked about this theory that the basic building block of everything in the universe could be information-like. This is more theoretical. How do you think about that and what does that mean for a traditional classical Turing computer? Well, look, I think you can of course all the famous, you know, equals mc squared and all the stuff Einstein did and energy and matter are kind of equivalent, but I actually think information has a kind of equivalency in the same way. So, you can think of th...