[Written by Chat GPT 5.2]
Two documentaries, separated by subject but united by premise, offer radically different answers to the same question: what happens when you assemble “the smartest guys in the room”? The Thinking Game follows DeepMind’s quest to solve protein folding with AlphaFold—an achievement that reshaped biology and was rapidly crowned with a Nobel Prize. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room chronicles a different experiment in brilliance, where elite intellect, unmoored from constraint, produced one of the great financial and social disasters of modern capitalism. Read together, the films become a study not of intelligence itself, but of the institutions that shape what intelligence becomes.# # # #
The Smartest Guys, Twice Over
There is a curious symmetry between The Thinking Game and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a symmetry that only becomes visible when the two films are placed side by side. Each is organized around a familiar modern premise: gather the smartest people you can find, give them unprecedented resources, remove constraints, and watch history bend. In one case, history bends toward one of the most consequential scientific breakthroughs of the century. In the other, it collapses into fraud, spectacle, and ruin. The contrast is not merely moral; it is structural. These films ask, from opposite ends, what intelligence does when embedded in institutions—and what institutions do to intelligence.
The Thinking Game is suffused with an almost antique faith in cognition as a public good. Its protagonists—Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and the DeepMind research culture—are introduced not as corporate climbers but as obsessives. The film repeatedly returns to the idea that intelligence, properly pursued, is its own justification. Hassabis speaks less like a CEO than like a nineteenth-century natural philosopher, animated by the belief that understanding intelligence itself will unlock solutions to biology, medicine, and science at scale. AlphaFold’s triumph—the solution to protein structure prediction, long regarded as one of biology’s most stubborn problems—is presented not as a commercial coup but as an epistemic event. The decisive moment comes not when value is captured, but when knowledge is released: “fold everything,” and give it away.
By contrast, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room documents what happens when intelligence is yoked almost entirely to performative markets. Here, brilliance is not oriented toward understanding the world but toward gaming representations of it. The Enron executives are not stupid men; the film goes out of its way to emphasize their credentials, their fluency in complexity, their comfort with abstraction. But their intelligence is relentlessly instrumental. Accounting becomes not a descriptive practice but a creative one. Markets are not mechanisms for allocating resources but stages for theatrical deception. Intelligence, in this ecosystem, is measured by how quickly one can outrun consequence.
The most striking difference between the films lies in how each treats constraint. At DeepMind, constraint is embraced as a discipline. The AlphaFold team works against nature’s hardest limits—combinatorial explosion, incomplete data, computational bottlenecks—and treats those limits as the very reason the work matters. Failure is frequent, expected, even valorized. Time horizons stretch across decades. Success is defined by external reality: does the protein fold correctly, or not?
At Enron, constraint is treated as an enemy. Regulation is something to be arbitraged. Accounting rules are puzzles to be solved around, not obligations to be honored. Physical reality—the actual production of energy, the real availability of power—becomes secondary to financial narration. The company’s culture punishes skepticism and rewards velocity. Internal markets, performance ranking systems, and mark-to-market accounting sever feedback loops between truth and reward. Intelligence is celebrated precisely to the extent that it escapes verification.
Both films, intriguingly, invoke the language of revolution. The Thinking Game likens AGI research to the Manhattan Project, to electricity, to fire. Enron casts itself as reinventing capitalism, building markets where none existed before, transforming energy into a purely informational commodity. Yet only one of these revolutions survives contact with reality. The difference is not ambition but orientation. DeepMind’s revolution is outward-facing; its claims are falsifiable by the natural world. Enron’s revolution is inward-facing; its claims are sustained only by belief, narrative, and rising stock prices.
There is also a profound difference in how each film understands time. The Thinking Game is patient almost to the point of asceticism. Years pass without visible progress. The camera lingers on whiteboards, on late-night coding sessions, on incremental gains. The Nobel Prize, when it arrives, feels less like a coronation than a belated acknowledgment. In Enron, time accelerates toward collapse. Growth is exponential, expectations compound quarterly, and the future is continuously pulled forward into the present through hypothetical valuation. When the reckoning comes, it is sudden and total: sixteen years to build, weeks to destroy.
What ultimately separates these two visions of “the smartest guys in the room” is not intelligence itself but institutional purpose. DeepMind, for all its corporate backing and strategic positioning, is structured to reward alignment with truth. Enron is structured to reward alignment with appearance. In one system, intelligence converges on reality; in the other, it diverges from it. One produces a tool that thousands of scientists can now use to understand disease. The other produces a cautionary tale taught in business schools as an example of what brilliance becomes when decoupled from responsibility.
Seen together, the films suggest an uncomfortable conclusion. Intelligence is morally neutral. It magnifies whatever incentives surround it. Gather the smartest people in the world, and you may solve protein folding—or invent hypothetical future value accounting. The outcome depends less on IQ than on governance, norms, and the willingness of institutions to bind intelligence to something beyond self-regard.
That may be the quiet lesson linking these two very different films. The danger is not that we anoint “the smartest guys in the room.” It is that we fail to ask what room we have put them in.
Sources:
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (auto-transcript and accompanying review material)
- The Thinking Game (auto-transcript and orienting review material)
