The theory, as I understand it, is that the much-vaunted game engine was not as good as claimed, and the game was also not actually fun, and the man was deploying his IQ more in the service of drumming up publicity for his project than in actually making a quality product.

Whether this is true for Google eep Mind too, who can say. Certainly not me! They seem to pay very well, so this is clearly economically valuable activity. We should not shame Sir Demis for enabling it.

Surprisingly hard to find information about this via Google. Seems related to Demis' game company Elixir and their game Republic: The Revolution [0] for which he made some claim that it supported an infinite level of detail/polygons.

Just a cursory glance at the information though. Happy to be corrected or have more detail added.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic:_The_Revolution

The Internet never forgets...Pag 44: https://retrocdn.net/images/c/c7/Edge_UK_078.pdf

It's an in-joke in the British gaming industry.

Hassabis started out working for Pete 'Project Milo' Molyneux and learned how to hype himself very obviously from him (see the Edge article linked above). It's working out well for him but you can see the same breathless self-promotion from him now that we saw 20 years ago.

Fair play, it's made him rich, but we're screwed if we think people like him are the solution to anything.