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

A NEW YORK TIMES & SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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

'Mallaby has done full justice to his kaleidoscopically interesting subject ... expertly structured and vividly reported, the book presents the most insightful portrait of Hassabis to date' Financial Times

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.

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of several books including the The Power Law, More Money Than God and The Man Who Knew, which won the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.A former Financial Times contributing editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The highest praise for The Infinity Machine is to say that Mallaby has done full justice to his kaleidoscopically interesting subject ... expertly structured and vividly reported, the book presents the most insightful portrait of Hassabis to date -- Financial Times ― John Thornhill

When it comes to recounting the scientific challenges, Mallaby captures wonderfully the tension, the excitement and the joy -- Tom Whipple ― The Times

With unprecedented access, Mallaby had a front row seat... what results is a rich and clearly written account -- Gideon Lichfield ― Economist

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

Gripping, absolutely of the moment... I loved it because it's filled with really important ideas about how this wave of AI is changing our economy... but it's also got the element of a thriller -- Robert Peston ― The Rest is Money

Narrates this extraordinary saga, revealing deep truths about AI and showing how a determined man can shape history in unlikely ways -- Gillian Tett ― Financial Times

Mallaby, a longtime financial journalist, is a nimble storyteller, and his portrait of one of the single-minded personalities plunging the world into an uncertain future is also an engaging drama of discovery ― New Yorker

A hugely acclaimed recent book…a lot of people are talking about -- Amol Rajan ― Today Programme

Fascinating -- Fareed Zakaria ― CNN

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