The Infinity Machine

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

From one of our leading chroniclers of the intersection of innovation and capitalism, a landmark reckoning—based on unprecedented access—with one of the world’s most brilliant and driven tech visionaries, and his game-changing company

Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before turning 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in super-abundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the path he is still on, leading the AI research at Google, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe.

Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis's detractors, such as his estranged cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI's leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness.

No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, have at times regarded him as an "evil genius." He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs — for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them.

Despite Hassabis’s pivotal role inside Google’s engine room, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside and furiously critical of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis's quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.

A fascinating angle on the revolution of AI

The story of the DeepMind founder is interwoven beautifully in the wider story of the race to AGI, the most profound change humanity have ever experienced, possibly ever

A must-read for an AI-geek

Simply fantastic. Great addition to Suleyman's 'The Coming Wave'. The race to AGI is unstoppable.

The history is not long and each voice matters.

The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby is the grounding read I didn’t know I needed.

I listened to it on Audible over the past few days, and what left was a sense of how new all of this is. The history of the people and ideas that brought us to this moment is not long — and Mallaby tells it with the clarity and care it deserves. Demis Hassabis at the center, but really a portrait of a handful of minds — mostly men — who, through determination and genuine curiosity, built something none of them could fully predict.

There are only a few major players in this space. It helps to understand how they think.

What surprised me was how hopeful I felt by the end. AI can feel overwhelming — the pace of it, the scale of it, the sense that you’re always slightly behind. But sitting inside this history reminded me that we are genuinely at the beginning. That even one person’s way of seeing a problem can change the direction of an entire field. That the technology arrived through human choices, made by specific people, in specific moments.

If you want to understand where we are — not just technically, but historically — start here.

Demiss Hassabis, the balance between the man and his work

this is the rare book that delivers the man and the work in a amazingly well researched volume. Of course having first hand access to Demis Hassabis makes a huge difference :-)