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The Infinity Machine

by Sebastian Mallaby · 327 pages · ~6 hrs

Science & TechnologyBiography & MemoirBusiness & Management

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Sebastian Mallaby's The Infinity Machine is a biography of Demis Hassabis, cofounder of Google DeepMind. It is also an account of the race to build artificial general intelligence, told through the career of the person who has pursued it longest and most single-mindedly. Mallaby had extensive access to Hassabis and his colleagues over several years. He follows Hassabis from his upbringing in North London, the son of immigrant parents, through his years as a chess prodigy and his teenage work as a video game designer. He then studied computer science at Cambridge, founded a games studio, and earned a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience to learn how the brain produces memory and imagination. In 2010 he cofounded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, with the stated aim of "solving intelligence" and then using it to solve everything else. The book traces DeepMind's sale to Google, its game-playing breakthroughs culminating in AlphaGo's match against Lee Sedol, and AlphaFold's solution to the protein-folding problem, which earned Hassabis a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Mallaby also covers the tensions that came with success: arguments over independence and ethical oversight inside Google, the falling-out with Suleyman, and the competitive shock of OpenAI's rise. He presents Hassabis as a scientist-strategist whose deepest motive is understanding rather than wealth, yet who has had to compete in a commercial arms race whose dangers he openly acknowledges. Mallaby, a journalist and Council on Foreign Relations fellow who has written about hedge funds, Alan Greenspan and venture capital, uses the story to ask whether anyone can steer a technology this powerful once the race is underway. Along the way the book doubles as an accessible introduction to how modern AI systems work.

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