The Infinity Machine - by Sebastian Mallaby (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"The brilliant Demis Hassabis and the company he cofounded, DeepMind, blazed the trail for the AI that is transforming our world. In this deeply reported and profoundly insightful book, Sebastian Mallaby chronicles the technological breakthroughs, the struggles over safety, the triumph of understanding protein folding, and the competition with OpenAI and other players. The result is not only a colorful and engrossing tale but also a sophisticated description of how AI developed." --Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk

"Will AI save humanity or doom it? Will the quest for scientific discovery survive Silicon Valley's relentless race for profit? With keen insight and narrative verve, Sebastian Mallaby tackles these big questions through this extraordinary tale of how a charismatic chess prodigy from North London became a Nobel Prize-winning architect of the AI revolution. The result is a truly revealing window into the biggest business phenomenon of our age--one shaped by old friendships and new rivalries, big ideas and unbridled competition, and 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: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

"Sebastian Mallaby has tunneled deeply into one of the most influential artificial intelligence projects of our time. It's an entrancing and revealing journey, and what he finds is at once inspiring and terrifying." --Steve Coll, Pulitzer prize award-winning author of Ghost Wars

"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, Chairman of Sequoia Capital and author of Return to the Little Kingdom

"The Infinity Machine is a deeply reported portrait of one of the most impactful visionaries in the world as he crafts one of the most impactful technologies in human history. It is as fascinating as it is important." --David Epstein, author of Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

"The Infinity Machine captures the extraordinary drama of the high-stakes AI arms race. Sebastian Mallaby shows how Demis Hassabis built DeepMind, set off the AI revolution, and is redrawing the map of global power. It's a gripping story about ambition colliding with ethics at the frontier of machine intelligence." -- Chris Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

"A vivid, multifaceted portrait of Hassabis and the defining history of DeepMind--the most consequential acquisition of the AI era. Mallaby brings new light to the personalities, internal conflicts, and battles with Google that shaped the laboratory teaching machines to think." --Patrick McGee, New York Times bestselling author of Apple in China

"The Infinity Machine is an extraordinary portrait of our age--beautifully written, clear-eyed, and engaged in the deepest ethical questions of our day.' -- Rory Stewart, author of Politics on the Edge

"Mallaby's brilliant idea here is to tell the story of modern AI -- the most important technology of our lifetimes -- through the life of Demis Hassabis, one of its most important and fascinating figures. The Infinity Machine will teach you a lot AI, and about how human ability, vision, and tenacity remake the world." -- Andrew McAfee, author of The Geek Way and coauthor of The Second Machine Age

About the Author

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of several books including the bestselling More Money Than God. 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.