When I was a kid, I was actually — my favorite subject was physics.  And usually, if you’re interested in the big questions about the universe, you would become a physicist.  That’s the normal route for that.  It was my favorite subject all the way up to university, but then I read this book called Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg, who is a Nobel Prize winner, and I must have been in my late teens.  And this is all about a physicist struggling to find a final theory of everything, like how everything works, and that’s what string theory’s about and so on.  And I realized that they actually hadn’t got that far yet.  Some of the things they were tackling were incredibly difficult, and no one seemed to be making progress.  So it felt to me like maybe what was needed was more intelligence and maybe something like AI as a sort of smart tool to help scientists.  It could be something that would allow us to make those kinds of breakthroughs and find the kind of theories that we were after.  So it felt to me like working on AI would be more fruitful and then using that as a tool to help solve things in physics and other sciences.