“I’ve had this vision in my mind for quite a while,” says Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind and the leader of Google’s AI efforts. Hassabis has been thinking about and working on AI for decades, but four or five years ago, something really crystallized. One day soon, he realized, “we would have this universal assistant. It’s multimodal, it’s with you all the time.” Call it the Star Trek Communicator; call it the voice from Her; call it whatever you want. “It’s that helper,” Hassabis co...