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The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence
'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 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.
'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 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.
467 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 31, 2026
About the author
Sebastian Mallaby
13 books341 followersA Washington Post columnist since 1999. Worked for The Economist from 1986 - 1999.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 230 reviews
April 1, 2026
It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of the description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence.
Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of where some our key AI expertise came from.
Perhaps not surprisingly, where the book really takes off is in the later chapters, after the successes of AlphaGo and AlphaFold. when the DeepMind people were left behind by OpenAI's generative AI work and had to rapidly change gear under outside pressure. Let's face it, a story of responding to threat is much more interesting than one of straight success. Not only was this phase of development one where the team was caught on the back foot, a huge rift emerged over whether developers should be heading towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) very carefully for safety reasons (the initial DeepMind approach) or just going for it full throttle like OpenAI.
It's arguable some of the safety concerns were fruitless in that large language models seem unlikely ever to be the starting point for a true AGI, but there was (and is) still a very real threat from this software in areas such as privacy, copyright theft and environmental impact. This part of the book is unputdownable stuff.
Overall, The Infinity Machine is a little too long, giving too much detail of the people outside the core group and of every step along the way of the company's development. However, this doesn't really matter as it provides excellent documentation of a key player in the rise and rise of AI.
Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of where some our key AI expertise came from.
Perhaps not surprisingly, where the book really takes off is in the later chapters, after the successes of AlphaGo and AlphaFold. when the DeepMind people were left behind by OpenAI's generative AI work and had to rapidly change gear under outside pressure. Let's face it, a story of responding to threat is much more interesting than one of straight success. Not only was this phase of development one where the team was caught on the back foot, a huge rift emerged over whether developers should be heading towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) very carefully for safety reasons (the initial DeepMind approach) or just going for it full throttle like OpenAI.
It's arguable some of the safety concerns were fruitless in that large language models seem unlikely ever to be the starting point for a true AGI, but there was (and is) still a very real threat from this software in areas such as privacy, copyright theft and environmental impact. This part of the book is unputdownable stuff.
Overall, The Infinity Machine is a little too long, giving too much detail of the people outside the core group and of every step along the way of the company's development. However, this doesn't really matter as it provides excellent documentation of a key player in the rise and rise of AI.
Read
May 23, 2026An unexpectedly motivating book to listen to while running."If you haven't collapsed, you haven't tried your best."
I like how philosophical and narrative-driven Demis Hassabis is.
According to him, the universe can only be perceived through your brain, and therefore, there are 2 ways to understand the universe: through physics and through neuroscience. Physics is external. Neuroscience is internal. Demis chose neuroscience.
In this framing, information is the unit of the universe, not atom.
The first 1/3 of the book covers the story Demis tells about his life. The last 1/3 of the book, however, is the author trying to do speed run of AI coverage, which is less interesting to me.
I like how philosophical and narrative-driven Demis Hassabis is.
According to him, the universe can only be perceived through your brain, and therefore, there are 2 ways to understand the universe: through physics and through neuroscience. Physics is external. Neuroscience is internal. Demis chose neuroscience.
In this framing, information is the unit of the universe, not atom.
The first 1/3 of the book covers the story Demis tells about his life. The last 1/3 of the book, however, is the author trying to do speed run of AI coverage, which is less interesting to me.
May 9, 2026
Every book Sebastian Mallaby writes is phenomenal and this one is no exception (full disclosure: Sebastian is a friend, a friendship that started more than twenty years ago when I made it clear to him that I did not think every one of his Washington Post columns was phenomenal).
The subject of the biography portion (Demis Hassabis) is fascinating, and the chronicling of recent developments in AI could not be more important and timely. Hassabis is almost unique in the landscape: neuroscientist, chess prodigy, game designer, AI pioneer, and one of the most significant scientists of recent times — AlphaFold alone would secure that verdict. One character says he is the type who would have won a Nobel no matter what, not by luck but inevitably. He seems driven by knowledge and importance rather than money, yet as AI becomes big business he ends up selling to and working for the largest of large companies, Google.
The cradle-to-present biography makes for riveting reading — rarely is the childhood portion of a biography as gripping as this one, which recounts stories of his chess prowess at age five with the same intensity as the later chapters. (Mozart comes to mind.)
As the book gets closer to the present it becomes more of a recounting of events we all lived through, paid attention to at the time, and that somehow feel like the distant past even though they are only a few years ago — from the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 to each subsequent iteration and the responses and one-ups by Gemini. All told with considerable weight on Hassabis' perspective and very little sympathy for some of the other players in the drama, most notably Sam Altman, with Mustafa Suleyman occupying a more ambiguous middle ground.
The book is also an interesting exploration of people who are building a technology they are both excited and ambivalent about — doing it within corporations they are likewise both excited and ambivalent about — while trying, in Hassabis' case, to balance a deep enthusiasm for scientific discovery against commercial imperatives. It uses personalities to provide perspective and insight on some of the biggest and most profound issues in the space.
Ultimately the portrait is of everyone stuck in a race no one (or at least not Hassabis) wants to be in, because there are so many competitors in the United States and increasingly in China that coordination becomes impossible. Normally in the economy this is a good thing — competition drives innovation, lowers consumer prices, and makes collusion both difficult and illegal. But it does make me wonder whether that logic holds in this particular case.
This book is only the first chapter in the story of AI. Whether it is also the first chapter, or the first volume, or the complete book for Hassabis personally remains to be seen. The epilogue teases tantalizing possibilities for future fundamental research in physics and other areas, which I found genuinely exciting. But it is also possible that AI is becoming more about organizations than individuals, or that the central figures going forward will be different from Hassabis — as to some degree they already have been for the past few years. We'll see.
The subject of the biography portion (Demis Hassabis) is fascinating, and the chronicling of recent developments in AI could not be more important and timely. Hassabis is almost unique in the landscape: neuroscientist, chess prodigy, game designer, AI pioneer, and one of the most significant scientists of recent times — AlphaFold alone would secure that verdict. One character says he is the type who would have won a Nobel no matter what, not by luck but inevitably. He seems driven by knowledge and importance rather than money, yet as AI becomes big business he ends up selling to and working for the largest of large companies, Google.
The cradle-to-present biography makes for riveting reading — rarely is the childhood portion of a biography as gripping as this one, which recounts stories of his chess prowess at age five with the same intensity as the later chapters. (Mozart comes to mind.)
As the book gets closer to the present it becomes more of a recounting of events we all lived through, paid attention to at the time, and that somehow feel like the distant past even though they are only a few years ago — from the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 to each subsequent iteration and the responses and one-ups by Gemini. All told with considerable weight on Hassabis' perspective and very little sympathy for some of the other players in the drama, most notably Sam Altman, with Mustafa Suleyman occupying a more ambiguous middle ground.
The book is also an interesting exploration of people who are building a technology they are both excited and ambivalent about — doing it within corporations they are likewise both excited and ambivalent about — while trying, in Hassabis' case, to balance a deep enthusiasm for scientific discovery against commercial imperatives. It uses personalities to provide perspective and insight on some of the biggest and most profound issues in the space.
Ultimately the portrait is of everyone stuck in a race no one (or at least not Hassabis) wants to be in, because there are so many competitors in the United States and increasingly in China that coordination becomes impossible. Normally in the economy this is a good thing — competition drives innovation, lowers consumer prices, and makes collusion both difficult and illegal. But it does make me wonder whether that logic holds in this particular case.
This book is only the first chapter in the story of AI. Whether it is also the first chapter, or the first volume, or the complete book for Hassabis personally remains to be seen. The epilogue teases tantalizing possibilities for future fundamental research in physics and other areas, which I found genuinely exciting. But it is also possible that AI is becoming more about organizations than individuals, or that the central figures going forward will be different from Hassabis — as to some degree they already have been for the past few years. We'll see.
April 17, 2026
Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Demis Hassabis is the do-gooder story of a biracial North Londoner, a Cypriot-Singaporean second-generation immigrant, a scholarship boy and chess master, a child prodigy and a polymath, with advanced degrees in computer science and neuroscience, who, in his rapid career, would make a lucrative profit as a video-game designer, build an AI program that could defeat the top Go player in the world, and solve the mystery of protein folding—ultimately winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It's an incredible life-story for a man still in his prime. Mallaby's biography paints a portrait of a straight-talking, unpretentious scientist driven purely by the desire to understand the cosmos, and determined to build a superintelligence that can tackle the most intractable problems. Showing all his typical swaggering confidence and scientific ambition, the epilogue finishes with a teaser—will Demis Hassabis use AI to rewrite quantum mechanics next?
Yet, ironically, as the book progresses, Demis Hassabis recedes into the background. The success of his AI company, DeepMind, always depended on a team of like-minded AGI believers and businessmen, fellow scientists and Silicon-Valley bankrollers eager to make partnerships, take risks and blow off the plodding caution and corseting constraints of academia. Each chapter, and each project that Hassabis spearheaded, ultimately redounds on a rotating cast of characters: Shane Legg, Daan Wiestra, Vhlad Mnih, David Silver, Koray Kavukcuoglu, among many others. It's a success story with several protagonists. Demis Hassabis becomes less a figure of towering genius and more of a managerial overlord, coordinating projects, securing financial backers, defusing media crises, wrangling legal contracts, and working all hours of the night across multiple timezones.
It's a biography that, naturally, has to be diffuse—this is not about one person. There are too many people, too many projects, too many groundbreaking scientific papers. Mallaby's biography has the difficult task of balancing the stories of business chicanery and technological revolutions, from Peter Thiel skeptically funding projects he was betting against to Ilya Sutskever using Reinforcement Learning and Transformer architecture to build the first convincing Large Language Model. Personally, I preferred it when Mallaby gave a behind-the-scenes insight into the eccentric personalities—like the time Hassabis went to the birthday party of Elon Musk's wife in a rented-out castle in Tarrytown New York. All the men had to dress as samurai warriors and Musk himself took on the wold champion sumo wrestler. Mallaby generally refrains from editorial comment—except to defend Hassabis and AI from criticism—but it's moments like this that betray the adolescent antics driving and financing the frontier of artificial intelligence.
At the end of it all, I can't help but feel that the book barely dug beneath the surface. Musk lifting a world champion sumo wrestler, Mustafa Suleyman being kicked out of DeepMind for bullying, Larry Page having to be reminded that hummingbirds and whales are real, Sam Altman double-crossing everyone, and even Demis Hassabis holding progress meetings at 3am—you get the sense that people in the tech world are not well, fiercely intelligent yes, but sometimes lacking the "general" intelligence that they idolize. I wish Mallaby's biography had more vignettes, more interviews, and sharper character profiles. Something seems to be missing from this fascinating story.
Yet, ironically, as the book progresses, Demis Hassabis recedes into the background. The success of his AI company, DeepMind, always depended on a team of like-minded AGI believers and businessmen, fellow scientists and Silicon-Valley bankrollers eager to make partnerships, take risks and blow off the plodding caution and corseting constraints of academia. Each chapter, and each project that Hassabis spearheaded, ultimately redounds on a rotating cast of characters: Shane Legg, Daan Wiestra, Vhlad Mnih, David Silver, Koray Kavukcuoglu, among many others. It's a success story with several protagonists. Demis Hassabis becomes less a figure of towering genius and more of a managerial overlord, coordinating projects, securing financial backers, defusing media crises, wrangling legal contracts, and working all hours of the night across multiple timezones.
It's a biography that, naturally, has to be diffuse—this is not about one person. There are too many people, too many projects, too many groundbreaking scientific papers. Mallaby's biography has the difficult task of balancing the stories of business chicanery and technological revolutions, from Peter Thiel skeptically funding projects he was betting against to Ilya Sutskever using Reinforcement Learning and Transformer architecture to build the first convincing Large Language Model. Personally, I preferred it when Mallaby gave a behind-the-scenes insight into the eccentric personalities—like the time Hassabis went to the birthday party of Elon Musk's wife in a rented-out castle in Tarrytown New York. All the men had to dress as samurai warriors and Musk himself took on the wold champion sumo wrestler. Mallaby generally refrains from editorial comment—except to defend Hassabis and AI from criticism—but it's moments like this that betray the adolescent antics driving and financing the frontier of artificial intelligence.
At the end of it all, I can't help but feel that the book barely dug beneath the surface. Musk lifting a world champion sumo wrestler, Mustafa Suleyman being kicked out of DeepMind for bullying, Larry Page having to be reminded that hummingbirds and whales are real, Sam Altman double-crossing everyone, and even Demis Hassabis holding progress meetings at 3am—you get the sense that people in the tech world are not well, fiercely intelligent yes, but sometimes lacking the "general" intelligence that they idolize. I wish Mallaby's biography had more vignettes, more interviews, and sharper character profiles. Something seems to be missing from this fascinating story.
June 15, 2026
Very well written biography of Demis and DeepMind. Quite liked the conversations between the author and Demis and how AI can be used to really peek under the hood of the mysteries of the universe we live in. Especially how they went about AlphaFold that led to the Chemisty Nobel. Also interspersed with quite a few good explanations of the technology underlying this AI revolution we’re living through.
April 14, 2026
The Infinity Machine left me deeply conflicted, much like many contemporary tech history books chasing the current AI gold rush. At its heart, it promises an insider’s look at the rise of DeepMind and the leadership of Demis Hassabis, but it ultimately struggles to find its footing between serious journalism and a carefully curated corporate memoir.
The biggest hurdle is the book’s unclear target audience. The material simply doesn’t cover the technical or historical landscape in enough depth for anyone actually working in the field, making it redundant for experts who already know the players and the problems. Yet, for the general reader, it rambles through industry tangents and insider anecdotes that feel more like scattered notes than a cohesive narrative. It’s caught in that frustrating middle ground: too superficial for specialists, yet too dense with unexplained context for newcomers.
My primary criticism, however, lies in how the book handles Demis Hassabis and the broader AI leadership class. The narrative leans heavily into the now-familiar trope of these tech founders as modern-day saints, deeply concerned with AI alignment and the preservation of humanity. But where was that same ethical vigilance when foundational IP was systematically scraped from millions of creators without consent or compensation? The text conveniently sidesteps this two-faced reality. Furthermore, despite Hassabis’s public insistence on a pure, almost academic pursuit of science, the book barely acknowledges the grueling, burnout-inducing work culture he’s known to cultivate, nor does it address the discrepancies between his public statements and internal practices. The disconnect between the polished ethos and the operational reality is stark, and the author does little to interrogate it.
All this being said, the level of access is undeniable. The book is clearly built on extensive interviews, and there are fleeting moments where the behind-the-scenes glimpses into the AI race feel genuinely illuminating. But the relentless whitewashing makes you question whether the author truly wrote this book or merely transcribed a legacy project. If you’re looking for a critical, unvarnished examination of the AI boom and its architects, you’ll need to look elsewhere. For industry enthusiasts who don’t mind reading between the lines, it offers a passable, if deeply flawed, window into the machine.
The biggest hurdle is the book’s unclear target audience. The material simply doesn’t cover the technical or historical landscape in enough depth for anyone actually working in the field, making it redundant for experts who already know the players and the problems. Yet, for the general reader, it rambles through industry tangents and insider anecdotes that feel more like scattered notes than a cohesive narrative. It’s caught in that frustrating middle ground: too superficial for specialists, yet too dense with unexplained context for newcomers.
My primary criticism, however, lies in how the book handles Demis Hassabis and the broader AI leadership class. The narrative leans heavily into the now-familiar trope of these tech founders as modern-day saints, deeply concerned with AI alignment and the preservation of humanity. But where was that same ethical vigilance when foundational IP was systematically scraped from millions of creators without consent or compensation? The text conveniently sidesteps this two-faced reality. Furthermore, despite Hassabis’s public insistence on a pure, almost academic pursuit of science, the book barely acknowledges the grueling, burnout-inducing work culture he’s known to cultivate, nor does it address the discrepancies between his public statements and internal practices. The disconnect between the polished ethos and the operational reality is stark, and the author does little to interrogate it.
All this being said, the level of access is undeniable. The book is clearly built on extensive interviews, and there are fleeting moments where the behind-the-scenes glimpses into the AI race feel genuinely illuminating. But the relentless whitewashing makes you question whether the author truly wrote this book or merely transcribed a legacy project. If you’re looking for a critical, unvarnished examination of the AI boom and its architects, you’ll need to look elsewhere. For industry enthusiasts who don’t mind reading between the lines, it offers a passable, if deeply flawed, window into the machine.
June 8, 2026
If you’re like me.
And you’re feeling fascinated/concerned regarding advanced AI, and the psychosocial and political and military and economic and professional and educational and existential (keep adding categories if I missed any - there’s just way too many to list here) impact that it is/will have on all of us starting now, and probably increasing in an exponentially increasingly awesomely awful rate.
Than this might be a pretty good book for you.
It was for me.
It’s Sebastian Mallaby’s biography of Demis Hassabis, the cofounder of DeepMind. And it’s also a history of the race toward advanced AI and superintelligence.
And race is the correct word here.
It’s more of an arms race.
And there just a TON of money and power on the line.
And may the end of society/humanity if it goes wrong.
Anyway.
The first act follows Hassabis from chess prodigy and game designer to (way prodigious - way out front) AI pioneer.
The second act examines how Hassabis (and co) created DeepMind to pursue artificial general intelligence through breakthroughs like AlphaGo and AlphaFold.
Hassabis won a Nobel prize for the AlphaFold work.
The guy is kind of amazing.
And he’s also kind of may be driving us off a cliff.
Him and like literally a handful of other people.
The
The third act explores the tension between scientific discovery, corporate power, AI safety, Google’s control of DeepMind, and competition with OpenAI.
Anyway.
It may be the end of history pretty soon here.
But in the meantime.
History is being written right now.
Like WAY too fast.
And without a break, steering wheel or seatbelt.
YIKES!!!
- 5/5⭐️
And you’re feeling fascinated/concerned regarding advanced AI, and the psychosocial and political and military and economic and professional and educational and existential (keep adding categories if I missed any - there’s just way too many to list here) impact that it is/will have on all of us starting now, and probably increasing in an exponentially increasingly awesomely awful rate.
Than this might be a pretty good book for you.
It was for me.
It’s Sebastian Mallaby’s biography of Demis Hassabis, the cofounder of DeepMind. And it’s also a history of the race toward advanced AI and superintelligence.
And race is the correct word here.
It’s more of an arms race.
And there just a TON of money and power on the line.
And may the end of society/humanity if it goes wrong.
Anyway.
The first act follows Hassabis from chess prodigy and game designer to (way prodigious - way out front) AI pioneer.
The second act examines how Hassabis (and co) created DeepMind to pursue artificial general intelligence through breakthroughs like AlphaGo and AlphaFold.
Hassabis won a Nobel prize for the AlphaFold work.
The guy is kind of amazing.
And he’s also kind of may be driving us off a cliff.
Him and like literally a handful of other people.
The
The third act explores the tension between scientific discovery, corporate power, AI safety, Google’s control of DeepMind, and competition with OpenAI.
Anyway.
It may be the end of history pretty soon here.
But in the meantime.
History is being written right now.
Like WAY too fast.
And without a break, steering wheel or seatbelt.
YIKES!!!
- 5/5⭐️
June 6, 2026
breathless corporate hagiography. Hard to read
May 3, 2026
All I could think about was how much better this would’ve been if it was written by Walter Isaacson
Did Not Finish
June 25, 2026Quit after about 3 chapters. Maybe I'll give this one another try down the road -- there's definitely some interesting history and technical discussion here -- but I find the amount of fawning over Demis Hassabis in this book pretty unbearable. Do we really need to keep bludgeoning the reader with acknowledgments of Hassabis's "remarkable" achievements and chapter titles like "Destiny" or "The Jedi"? C'mon man.
May 24, 2026
Hassabis and DeepMind are an interesting topic worthy of a book like this, but the author was not up to the task. Most painfully, this is written with the density of a Scholastic magazine; it easily could have been half as long. He also understands impressively little of the technology, and manages to produce pure word salad trying to explain transformers. It’s a little baffling that no technically competent person was enlisted to proofread these sections. Also unfortunate that he didn’t leverage the interviews the book was based on more, I would have loved to hear more inside baseball about the labs.
Mild recommend, but I don’t feel like you’ll learn much if you’ve been paying attention to Twitter the last few years.
Mild recommend, but I don’t feel like you’ll learn much if you’ve been paying attention to Twitter the last few years.
June 12, 2026
It’s supposed to be the most breathtaking breakthrough for the past 50 years. How can the writer deliver such a dull boring story? And because Jeff Dean got promoted so Moose lost his spot in mtv. Excuse me, Do you know what you are saying…
July 11, 2026
先说说比较喜欢这本书的部分：
- 并不局限于某一家公司的产品，而是用比较全面的视角呈现了近20年来人工智能的发展，一直到现在变成 AI arm race 的状态。
- 早期 DeepMind 的崛起部分其实比后来 OpenAI 那些八卦更好看。Alpha Go 打败李世石的情节看得人热血沸腾。
- OpenAI 和微软现在的状态简直就是当年 DeepMind 和 Google 关系的重现
- AI 竞争激烈且残酷，而且现在就「谁是赢家」下定论仍然为时尚早。
觉得有点惋惜的地方：
- 有些情节有点流水账
- 作者八卦心跟看客一样重。这没什么，但有些章节如果只讲八卦就会让内容失去内核
最后，作者当然没这么讲，但看完这本书我更坚信，Altman 就是 AI 时代的 Musk.
- 并不局限于某一家公司的产品，而是用比较全面的视角呈现了近20年来人工智能的发展，一直到现在变成 AI arm race 的状态。
- 早期 DeepMind 的崛起部分其实比后来 OpenAI 那些八卦更好看。Alpha Go 打败李世石的情节看得人热血沸腾。
- OpenAI 和微软现在的状态简直就是当年 DeepMind 和 Google 关系的重现
- AI 竞争激烈且残酷，而且现在就「谁是赢家」下定论仍然为时尚早。
觉得有点惋惜的地方：
- 有些情节有点流水账
- 作者八卦心跟看客一样重。这没什么，但有些章节如果只讲八卦就会让内容失去内核
最后，作者当然没这么讲，但看完这本书我更坚信，Altman 就是 AI 时代的 Musk.
May 11, 2026
Definitely worth a read, this is right up to date and includes plenty of material 'never seen before in public', Mallaby has spent years putting it together and has spent lots of time with all the players in the story, especially Demis Hassabis. AI is the big story of our time and Demis is one of the key players. The chapter here on the Nobel Prize winning chemistry research AlphaFold (protein folding), is fascinating and SM does an excellent job in making it accessible . DH ultimately wins the Chemistry Nobel prize for this and is at the forefront of AI research, when along comes ChatGPT. How Google Deepmind fights back to catch up with OpenAI is a great story well told, Sergei Brin gets back into Google and appoints DH as the boss of the whole of Google AI, though he stays in London.
DH and Deepmind's relationship with Google makes for some odd episodes, which were unknown before this book - for some reason Demis and his cofounders try to renegotiate the company structure, to create a controlling board independent of Google, and a not-for-profit structure, but they do this years after they've sold the entire business to Google. I'm not sure we've quite got to the bottom of this because the plan also seemed to feature shares for staff, and investment of $5 billion by new investors, I don't see how that makes much sense without any future profits.
But the end result is that the Google AI division is largely run out of London, and Google Gemini is one of the best large language models, which reflects very well on Demis Hassabis.
Strongly recommend.
DH and Deepmind's relationship with Google makes for some odd episodes, which were unknown before this book - for some reason Demis and his cofounders try to renegotiate the company structure, to create a controlling board independent of Google, and a not-for-profit structure, but they do this years after they've sold the entire business to Google. I'm not sure we've quite got to the bottom of this because the plan also seemed to feature shares for staff, and investment of $5 billion by new investors, I don't see how that makes much sense without any future profits.
But the end result is that the Google AI division is largely run out of London, and Google Gemini is one of the best large language models, which reflects very well on Demis Hassabis.
Strongly recommend.
May 15, 2026
Demis is one of the most important people in AI. Regardless of how you feel about this technology, its impact on our world is unmistakable—whether good or bad. It is, and will only continue to be, a co-author of our future. Read this book to better understand why and how.
June 19, 2026
It leans toward worship and doesn't press the ethical contradictions. It raises hard questions, then leaves you empty-handed. Little here is new if you already follow the field, and it's still too long for the story it tells.
May 13, 2026
Hagiographic and structurally uninspiring. The way Mallaby lays out the chronology is frustrating, it mostly follows the timeline but then jumps around enough to make it confusing.
Large swaths just felt like Mallaby taking dictation from, usually, Hassabis or another source. I get that it’s a valuable resource that he had so much direct success but it seems like the methods outshined the ultimate artifact. I’m personally not a fan of Mallaby inserting his process so much talking about himself emailing and sitting down with his sources. At points it just devolves into Q&A. I thought I’d be getting more of a straight history with Hassabis as the main focus.
Main it was just the narrator of my audiobook but the end result for me was that I found it quite boring, when the subject should be riveting. Felt the same way about The Power Law, and leaves me wondering how these two books can be so much worse than More Money than God.
Large swaths just felt like Mallaby taking dictation from, usually, Hassabis or another source. I get that it’s a valuable resource that he had so much direct success but it seems like the methods outshined the ultimate artifact. I’m personally not a fan of Mallaby inserting his process so much talking about himself emailing and sitting down with his sources. At points it just devolves into Q&A. I thought I’d be getting more of a straight history with Hassabis as the main focus.
Main it was just the narrator of my audiobook but the end result for me was that I found it quite boring, when the subject should be riveting. Felt the same way about The Power Law, and leaves me wondering how these two books can be so much worse than More Money than God.
April 14, 2026
The Infinity Machine : Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (2025) by Sebastian Mallaby is a biography of the remarkable Demis Hassabis and of the current race to build machine intelligence. Mallaby is a writer who has been a Washington Post columnist and who has written various books on Alan Greenspan and Hedge funds among other topics.
Hassabis was born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother. They had little money. Demis learnt chess at four and was a chess champion by six. At six he qualified for the British Under 14 Championship. By the age of 12 he had decided that becoming very good at chess wasn’t wise. He thought intelligence should be used for more. Hassabis used money won in chess to buy a ZX Spectrum. At 12 he bought an Amiga and started to learn to program. He started by trying to write chess programs. He soon wrote an Othello program that worked.
Hassabis did incredibly well at school and skipped grades and got admission to Cambridge early. They told him to wait and so he worked for the Bullfrog games company. There he coded and helped develop their hit game Theme Park. He then went to Cambridge and did extremely well there. After Cambridge he founded the company Elixir and sold that before doing a PhD in neuroscience at University College London.
After that he founded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Deepmind became one of the world’s premier AI labs and was taken over by Google. DeepMind created AlphaGo that beat the world’s best Go player. They then went on to create AlphaFold that solved the problem of what protein came from what amino acid sequence. For this work Hassabis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Following AlphaFold the next big breakthrough in Machine Learning was Transformers and the rise of the LLM. Here the book gets into how Google invented the Transformer but failed to exploit it. OpenAI, led eventually by Sam Altman took the lead and released ChatGPT. The book goes into detail about how DeepMind and Google reacted to this. There is little mention of Anthropic, one of the other major AI labs. The incredible leaps in ability of LLMs and how they forced Google to change their organisation and operation are interesting to read about. Hassabis and others were impressed by these models but somewhat skeptical of their practical applications. However this has changed as the models have improved.
The Infinity Machine is a well written, interesting read about the remarkable figure of Hassabis and the recent history of AI development. Hassabis comes across as he does everywhere as an incredibly driven, incredibly intelligent person who is also a decent human being. The book does veer a bit into hagiography, but it does appear to concur with almost everything written about Hassabis. This is in sharp contrast to writing about Sam Altman. For anyone interested in the personalities behind AI and its recent history the book is well worth a read.
Hassabis was born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother. They had little money. Demis learnt chess at four and was a chess champion by six. At six he qualified for the British Under 14 Championship. By the age of 12 he had decided that becoming very good at chess wasn’t wise. He thought intelligence should be used for more. Hassabis used money won in chess to buy a ZX Spectrum. At 12 he bought an Amiga and started to learn to program. He started by trying to write chess programs. He soon wrote an Othello program that worked.
Hassabis did incredibly well at school and skipped grades and got admission to Cambridge early. They told him to wait and so he worked for the Bullfrog games company. There he coded and helped develop their hit game Theme Park. He then went to Cambridge and did extremely well there. After Cambridge he founded the company Elixir and sold that before doing a PhD in neuroscience at University College London.
After that he founded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Deepmind became one of the world’s premier AI labs and was taken over by Google. DeepMind created AlphaGo that beat the world’s best Go player. They then went on to create AlphaFold that solved the problem of what protein came from what amino acid sequence. For this work Hassabis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Following AlphaFold the next big breakthrough in Machine Learning was Transformers and the rise of the LLM. Here the book gets into how Google invented the Transformer but failed to exploit it. OpenAI, led eventually by Sam Altman took the lead and released ChatGPT. The book goes into detail about how DeepMind and Google reacted to this. There is little mention of Anthropic, one of the other major AI labs. The incredible leaps in ability of LLMs and how they forced Google to change their organisation and operation are interesting to read about. Hassabis and others were impressed by these models but somewhat skeptical of their practical applications. However this has changed as the models have improved.
The Infinity Machine is a well written, interesting read about the remarkable figure of Hassabis and the recent history of AI development. Hassabis comes across as he does everywhere as an incredibly driven, incredibly intelligent person who is also a decent human being. The book does veer a bit into hagiography, but it does appear to concur with almost everything written about Hassabis. This is in sharp contrast to writing about Sam Altman. For anyone interested in the personalities behind AI and its recent history the book is well worth a read.
April 24, 2026
Excellent new perspective on the AI Arms Race
I have read multiple background books on the different companies involved in the race for AI dominance over the past year. Empire of AI does a good job showing the interworkings of OpenAI and Careless People gives you an inside look into Meta. I guess I could include Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk in the mix too, but it didn't take the xAI elements too into consideration in that book.
This book gives another valuable perspective in the AI arms race. The history of Hassabis and Deepmind is a critical piece of history in the development of AI. The stories related to his early life at Bullfrog Games, Elixir and many many Deepmind / Google projects such as Atari gaming, AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the AI models up to current Gemini models are all highly interesting and insightful. In particular I enjoyed the book talking about the actual technical assertions and building blocks of the Deepmind research. It taught me quite a bit about why they pursued the directions they did while others such as OpenAI pursued others.
The two most revealing elements of the book are seeing the contrast of Deepmind with it's primary focus of scientific research in AI (researcher led) vs OpenAI's primary focus on shipping products (engineer led). This contrast would play out quite a bit in the history of the past decade and I am surprised I wasn't more aware of it. The second thing that is really interesting is Hassabis's deep interest in Reinforced Learning (RL) which was the primary basis for the AlphaGo triumphs. Deepmind had very little interest in LLMs until OpenAI thrashed them so thoroghly that they were forced to accept this other approach was a better way than they were purusing. Interestingly, later versions of GPT actually started to explore back in the realm of RL, and Hassabis still believes that long term the research will come back around to RL as opposed to LLMs. We will see.
If you enjoy biographies or want to have better context on the current AI debates or progress, this is a great book to pick up.
I have read multiple background books on the different companies involved in the race for AI dominance over the past year. Empire of AI does a good job showing the interworkings of OpenAI and Careless People gives you an inside look into Meta. I guess I could include Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk in the mix too, but it didn't take the xAI elements too into consideration in that book.
This book gives another valuable perspective in the AI arms race. The history of Hassabis and Deepmind is a critical piece of history in the development of AI. The stories related to his early life at Bullfrog Games, Elixir and many many Deepmind / Google projects such as Atari gaming, AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the AI models up to current Gemini models are all highly interesting and insightful. In particular I enjoyed the book talking about the actual technical assertions and building blocks of the Deepmind research. It taught me quite a bit about why they pursued the directions they did while others such as OpenAI pursued others.
The two most revealing elements of the book are seeing the contrast of Deepmind with it's primary focus of scientific research in AI (researcher led) vs OpenAI's primary focus on shipping products (engineer led). This contrast would play out quite a bit in the history of the past decade and I am surprised I wasn't more aware of it. The second thing that is really interesting is Hassabis's deep interest in Reinforced Learning (RL) which was the primary basis for the AlphaGo triumphs. Deepmind had very little interest in LLMs until OpenAI thrashed them so thoroghly that they were forced to accept this other approach was a better way than they were purusing. Interestingly, later versions of GPT actually started to explore back in the realm of RL, and Hassabis still believes that long term the research will come back around to RL as opposed to LLMs. We will see.
If you enjoy biographies or want to have better context on the current AI debates or progress, this is a great book to pick up.
April 29, 2026
"Intelligence is fundamental. It is the root of all else. It is the mechanism through which humans perceive reality."
Fascinating to hear the backstory behind the current AI wars unfolding right in front of us. Quite interesting that Mallaby was able to write and publish this so quickly, while we are still in the thick of frontier lab warfare and a clear winner has yet to emerge.
Docking a star just because unfortunately, the biography seemed a bit too biased towards Hassabis (as one might expect though). I do think it's more valuable to read biographies like those by Walter Isaacson—where the author is able to pry deeply into an individual's life and interview people involved from both the good and bad sides, painting a portrait of them as a whole person rather than a pure hero.
We might need a Part 2 soon, once Superintelligence enters the picture...
-------------------------------------------
"The mind interprets the world."
"What I cannot build, I cannot understand."
"The most successful founders do not create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion."
"People make a mistake in thinking of themselves as small. They don't think of how they personally affect history."
"Technology happens because it's possible."
Fascinating to hear the backstory behind the current AI wars unfolding right in front of us. Quite interesting that Mallaby was able to write and publish this so quickly, while we are still in the thick of frontier lab warfare and a clear winner has yet to emerge.
Docking a star just because unfortunately, the biography seemed a bit too biased towards Hassabis (as one might expect though). I do think it's more valuable to read biographies like those by Walter Isaacson—where the author is able to pry deeply into an individual's life and interview people involved from both the good and bad sides, painting a portrait of them as a whole person rather than a pure hero.
We might need a Part 2 soon, once Superintelligence enters the picture...
-------------------------------------------
"The mind interprets the world."
"What I cannot build, I cannot understand."
"The most successful founders do not create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion."
"People make a mistake in thinking of themselves as small. They don't think of how they personally affect history."
"Technology happens because it's possible."
July 10, 2026
I'm not in an industry that's adopting AI quickly. There are benefits to that, for sure. I want to be aware of general trends happening and understand them better. My husband is directly in AI in his work.
This book provided the story of AI development through the anchor of Hassabis. I found it very detailed and interesting. Mallaby paints the timeline well.
I recommend this book if you want to know how we got to where we are with AI.
This book provided the story of AI development through the anchor of Hassabis. I found it very detailed and interesting. Mallaby paints the timeline well.
I recommend this book if you want to know how we got to where we are with AI.
April 9, 2026
Pretty well-written, very interesting subject matter, but not enough of a critical lens.
At the very beginning, it mentions that Hassabis decided to sit down and give interviews for the book because he believes it's good for the public to know what makes AI company leaders tick, and I think the book did a pretty good job of that for Hassabis, but not for DeepMind/Google as a whole.
The author is not very investigative/critical, and glosses lightly over DeepMind's failures (missing the transformer, poor performance of early models, etc), and very rarely challenges interviewees.
The book was a semi-chronological narrative that is heavily weighted towards more recent events. Hassabis's early life and DeepMind's first decade or so were totally unfamiliar to me and thus very very interesting, but the post-ChatGPT era (a solid 1/3rd or so of the book, due to the recency-heaviness) was a pain to get through because I've been so over-exposed to the topic.
Overall captivating read, but the optimal approach would be to just read whichever parts you're curious about.
At the very beginning, it mentions that Hassabis decided to sit down and give interviews for the book because he believes it's good for the public to know what makes AI company leaders tick, and I think the book did a pretty good job of that for Hassabis, but not for DeepMind/Google as a whole.
The author is not very investigative/critical, and glosses lightly over DeepMind's failures (missing the transformer, poor performance of early models, etc), and very rarely challenges interviewees.
The book was a semi-chronological narrative that is heavily weighted towards more recent events. Hassabis's early life and DeepMind's first decade or so were totally unfamiliar to me and thus very very interesting, but the post-ChatGPT era (a solid 1/3rd or so of the book, due to the recency-heaviness) was a pain to get through because I've been so over-exposed to the topic.
Overall captivating read, but the optimal approach would be to just read whichever parts you're curious about.
April 12, 2026
Excellent
A couple high points outside of a very well done and detailed profile of Hassabis:
-very clear high level descriptions of AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and others (better than what I've read before)
-interesting internal background of Google's efforts in AI/LLMs over past few years
A couple high points outside of a very well done and detailed profile of Hassabis:
-very clear high level descriptions of AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and others (better than what I've read before)
-interesting internal background of Google's efforts in AI/LLMs over past few years
June 30, 2026
A solid overview of the (recent) history of AI. Good on the surface for the layman yet surprisingly lacking pretty much any technical depth. Instead it focuses more on the mindset and philosophical drivers of the shepherds of the next technical revolution.
Also the author made no attempt to hide his massive hardon for Hassabis.
Also the author made no attempt to hide his massive hardon for Hassabis.
July 3, 2026
Pretty good. Mallaby is a great narrator and the story was pretty gripping. I am a little skeptical about how pro-Hassabis he is, even if I think Demis is the nicest of the lot, I would have loved if he spoke to the other execs.
March 30, 2026
A book that deeply believes in the goodness of both the guy (Hassabis) and the pursuit of a techno-utopia. The corporate intrigue stuff with Elon, Google, etc is very good.
Hassabis has said that his work is like “reading the mind of god.” But he also believes that computers will reach the same level of intelligence precisely because intelligence is mechanic.
Hassabis has said that his work is like “reading the mind of god.” But he also believes that computers will reach the same level of intelligence precisely because intelligence is mechanic.
May 29, 2026
Another great behind-the-scenes look at the battle for AI supremacy.
June 21, 2026
I highly recommend this book. It provides a good perspective of the technology and how it came about, while also providing context to better understand the players in the role of AI development.
July 12, 2026
The narrative is at its strongest when it outlines the interpersonal politics of the competing AI labs as opposed to its high-level technical explanations of the varying models. Although I was not rapt, I guess it’s enlightening to know that 98% of the people building AI think it’s capable of overtaking humans on all tasks and possibly even destroying humanity… but at this point, what the heck am I even supposed to do with that information!?
Anyways - this is more of a 3.25, not due to a lack of quality but simply because I often felt unmotivated to pick this book back up.
Anyways - this is more of a 3.25, not due to a lack of quality but simply because I often felt unmotivated to pick this book back up.
July 16, 2026
zero critical thinking in the back half. interesting enough charting out the early days but wildly contorts and contradicts itself once DeepMind starts falling behind
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