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.

A must-read for an AI-geek

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

Very topical biography of brilliant founder and CEO of Deep Mind - fascinating details about breakthroughs in AI

Details of AI advances based on technologies developed for video games- and the amazing background of Demis Hassabis

Context is helpful

Gaining a basic understanding of the process Deep Mind pursed is helpful in establishing some context for the emergence of AI for those of us who live outside the digital tech sphere. It’s a good book and I’d recommend it for anyone looking to better grasp the basic backstory of AI’s development. That said, I’m still waiting to read Gemini’s biography (or autobiography?).

the truth of boob

could had chapter for a deep dive on few Ai technologies (representation, high diemtionality, attention) for programmers/engineering

Superb as an audio book…

…now I’ll purchase the hard copy version, in order to reread sections. Although the narrator did an awesome job of presenting the text, it’s easier for me (as an old timer) to roam back and forth and ruminate on isolated thoughts presented in a book.

Mallaby did an exceptional and entertaining presentation of Hassabis’ life and accomplishments, placing him in the context of his peers - both contemporary and historical. A great read—highly recommended!