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The Infinity Machine

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence
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The Infinity Machine

By: Sebastian Mallaby
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A revelatory portrait of the visionary behind Google DeepMind, the race to control the future – and what it means to win
Even in a tech world crowded with visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. Born to working class, immigrant parents in North London, a chess prodigy by five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven-figure job offer from a video-game studio to study science at Cambridge. Long before the current obsession with AI, he founded the path-breaking company DeepMind in order to pursue a single, audacious goal: the dream of artificial superintelligence, which would solve humanity’s hardest problems, change life and work as we know it, and perhaps even unlock the deepest mysteries of the Universe. For his scientific achievements, he won a Nobel Prize in 2024, and his company, now Google DeepMind, is considered the tech giant’s engine room.
For the past three years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his inner circle as well as detractors and rivals at other companies. The result is a revelation-packed portrait of a singular mind and a historic reckoning with the AI revolution, a shift potentially more significant than any since the dawn of complex thought 70,000 years ago.
As Mallaby chronicles, DeepMind is locked in an arms race with Silicon Valley competitors to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby become the keeper of humanity’s future. Yet this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis has remained in Britain, and unlike his rivals, his aims are not wealth and power but scientific enlightenment. Like them, however, he is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. He aims to control the technology, but the technology may ultimately control him – and humanity writ large.

'Extraordinary... beautifully written, clear-eyed and engaged in the deepest ethical questions of our day' Rory Stewart

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Critic reviews

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 )
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