The Infinity Machine

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

By: Sebastian Mallaby

Narrated by: Vidish Athavale

An Instant New York Times Bestseller • One of NPR's Best Books of the Year • Nominated for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year

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.

Articulated well and insightful.

Understands AI and presents it to a non expert so that it’s easy to understand and grasp the profound implications.

Grateful for this book

Added so much context for me to the AI discussion and provided history in an engaging way.

Fascinating character

Exciting story and very interesting people and project. Excellent narrator. It gives the listener an idea of what it takes to reach a difficult goal.

Eye opening background on AI’s origins and evolution

Great storytelling, good job of connecting the dots from AI as a concept to how we interact with the current AI models. In the audiobook format you have to try and keep track of dates and major events, but the arc of the story is easy to follow and the author does a good job of connecting the dots when he goes backwards to tie a current major event in the AI race to something that may have been the root cause.

I enjoyed listening and highly recommend. This is a must listen for everyone. There isn’t anything as remotely consequential as AI in our modern world.

Books like this makes reinforces the great man theory of history in my mind.

I wonder how deep mind would’ve turned out if Demi Asaba had been more interested in business or equally as interested in business as he was in AI. For instance, if he had not made the Google deal and had forged his own path for deep mind.