To celebrate the fifth anniversary of AlphaFold, Google DeepMind is making the feature-length documentary 'The Thinking Game' available for free on YouTube starting November 25.
The film, shot over five years by the same team that documented AlphaGo, opens the lab doors to show key moments in the search for general artificial intelligence.
What the documentary shows
The film follows Demis Hassabis and DeepMind teams at decisive moments: the development of AlphaGo, solving the protein-folding challenge with AlphaFold, and other research milestones. You’ll see scenes of real scientific process, debates about research direction, and the moment the team realized they’d cracked a problem that had been unsolved for decades.
Seeing researchers in action helps you understand how theory, experimentation and a lot of engineering combine to move AI forward.
What does this mean for the technical community?
If you work on models, research or infrastructure, the documentary offers useful windows: how hypotheses are formed, which metrics matter, and how progress is evaluated. It’s not a technical tutorial, but it does contextualize decisions about experimental design, compute scaling and empirical validation.
