The Infinity Machine

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence

De: Sebastian Mallaby

Brought to you by Penguin.

An intimate portrait of the world’s most brilliant tech visionary and his game-changing company DeepMind, from award-winning financial journalist and historian Sebastian Mallaby

Even by the standards of an industry stacked with so-called visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. His journey to pursue the dream of super-human intelligence has taken him from working-class origins in North London to the founding of revolutionary AI company DeepMind to a Nobel Prize. Unlike many of his Silicon Valley peers, his goals are not money and power but scientific enlightenment.

For the past several years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind. In The Infinity Machine, he offers an unrivalled window into the AI revolution, a transformation potentially more significant than any since we gained a capacity for abstract thought 70,000 years ago. DeepMind is locked in an arms race to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby to become the keeper of humanity’s future. But, like his rivals, Hassabis is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. His goal is to build and control the technology. But the technology may ultimately control him—and humanity writ large.

© Sebastian Mallaby 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Reseñas de la Crítica

An extraordinary portrait of our age – beautifully written, clear-eyed and engaged in the deepest ethical questions of our day (Rory Stewart)

In this deeply reported and profoundly insightful book, Sebastian Mallaby chronicles the brilliant Demis Hassabis and the company he cofounded ... a colourful and engrossing tale but also a sophisticated description of how AI developed (Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk )

Sebastian Mallaby has tunnelled deeply into one of the most influential artificial intelligence projects of our time. It's an entrancing and revealing journey … at once inspiring and terrifying (Steve Coll, author of The Achilles Trap )

Captures the extraordinary drama of the high-stakes AI arms race ... a gripping story about ambition colliding with ethics at the frontier of machine intelligence (Chris Miller, author of Chip War )

A truly revealing window into the biggest business phenomenon of our age … a quest for superhuman intelligence that already has far outraced the ideals and imaginings of its human creators (Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code )

With his customary flair, Sebastian Mallaby relays the enchanting tale of how the British son of a Chinese Singaporean mother and Greek Cypriot father led google to pole position in the AI race and picked up a Nobel prize along the way (Michael Moritz, author of Leading )

The Infinity Machine will teach you a lot about AI, and how human ability, vision, and tenacity remake the world (Andrew McAfee, author of The Geek Way )