#870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Oh, boy.
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to re-record my intro seven million times every time I do an episode. Just kidding. It's my job to interview world-class performers and the people who study world-class performers. My guest today is one of my favorite nonfiction authors, Sebastian Mallaby. He is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of six books, including More Money Than God, Love It, The Power Law, Love It, The Man Who Knew, and The World's Banker. I have not read the latter two. Previously a columnist at The Washington Post and The Economist, Sebastian now co-hosts the CFR podcast, CFR is Council on Foreign Relations podcast, The Spillover, which examines the ripple effects of global events across policy, geopolitics, economics, finance, and technology. His latest book is The Infinity Machine. Demis Hassabis, Deep Mind and the Quest for Superintelligence. And in this conversation, we get into a lot. We get into his op-eds, different predictions. I would hesitate to call them observations of the AI ecosystem, how we actually timed it to get started before the launch of GPT 3.5 and much more. You can find Sebastian on X at SC Mallaby. So that's S-C-M-A-L-L-A-B-Y.
And you can find him on social very, very easily. Sebastian Mallaby. And with all that said, please enjoy a very, very broad conversation about AI, China, competition, open AI, anthropic, Google slash alphabet and much more. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Sebastian Mallaby** (1:53)
Can I ask you a personal question?

**Tim Ferriss** (2:11)
Sebastian, lovely to see you and thanks for making the time. I really appreciate it.

**Sebastian Mallaby** (2:16)
Great to be with you, Tim.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:18)
I wanted to just give you applause for writing some of my favorite books of the last many years. I am consistently impressed and maybe since I also put pen to paper every once in a while depressed, just thinking relatively about my capabilities, but of your capacity to paint a picture of the players on a landscape, but also the games they play in ways that non-specialists can understand.
I can't recall who first recommended it. Frankly, I believe it was a hedge fund manager in New York City, but More Money Than God Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite.
Certainly, that was in my particular case, followed by reading The Power Law, Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, which I didn't expect to learn as much from because I've spent 20 years surrounded by venture capitalists and doing angel investing, 17 years of that in Silicon Valley. And yet, I still had hundreds of highlights and so many stories that grabbed me from that book which I had not heard. And that made me very excited to read The Infinity Machine, which is the new book. And I realized also I've been pronouncing Demis' name incorrectly for a very long time despite having met him at one point. So, Demis Hassabis, Deep Mind and the Quest for Superintelligence. My question for you and we're going to come back to present day for people who are interested, of course, in what has been painted as a race to IPO. I think there's something to that in the air, so to speak, talking to people who are in San Francisco, involved with these companies. But nonetheless, I wanted to ask how the genesis of this book came to be. Because you, it would appear, began exploring these waters on the early side, which leads to a meta question of just general book selection. But let's focus on the Infinity Machine. How did this come to be? Where did the twinkle in the eye begin? What was the conversation, the thing you read, that triggered the gingerbread trail that got you to this book?

**Sebastian Mallaby** (4:32)
The Power Law, the book about venture capital, had come out in February of 2022
And while I was researching that, I'd been to lots of tech conferences, of course, including some in Europe.
And this twinkly-eyed guy would show up, Demis Hassabis. And he would look totally approachable and kind of guy next door and unintimidating. And then he would get on the stage and out of his mouth would come this spiel about computer science, neuroscience, chemistry, biology, physics, philosophy, the history of movies, you name it. And that mixture of the approachability and the massive intellect always struck me as beguiling. And I thought, hmm, this would be a great character to write about. And then at the same time, you know, I was aware of AlphaGo, the 2016 model that Demis's team at DeepMind had built, which defeated the world champion at Go. And then AlphaFold, which was the protein folding system. And both of these things had the quality that you had this almost infinite search space where the different permutations of the game of Go are almost infinite because they're so big. The different permutations of how you can fold an amino acid chain into a protein shape are even bigger. 130 zeros added onto the end of the number of permutations in Go. So you have these AI systems that could understand infinity. So this idea of an infinity machine began to percolate, and I figured it's interesting to me, probably at some point it will go mainstream. But even if it doesn't go mainstream, I love it, and I love Demis. And the two things together, I always look for the subject and the personality. I had both, and I thought, okay, this is a go, and I went to pitch Demis in early November 2022