The God Machine: Demis Hassabis and the Quest for Superintelligence | Sebastian Mallaby

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:00)
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing writer for The New Yorker, whose books have chronicled the defining figures and institutions of modern capitalism, from Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve to the hedge fund industry and the venture capital ecosystem of Silicon Valley, from which the defining technological innovations of the last half century have emerged. His latest work, The Infinity Machine, DeepMind, and The Quest for Superintelligence is a biography of Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind and the man regarded by many as the most important figure in the development of artificial general intelligence. Sebastian and I spent the first hour of this conversation exploring who Demis Hassabis is, where he came from, and what drives him, tracing his early life as a chess prodigy in North London, his studies in computer science at Cambridge and neuroscience at University College London, and the founding of DeepMind in 2010 alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. We discussed the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of his quest, including the shift from symbolic, rule-based AI development to the inductive, data-driven approach of deep learning, and also get into the competitive dynamics that have defined the industry, Google's acquisition of DeepMind in 2014, Hassabis' early skepticism toward language models and the transformer architecture, and the moment ChatGPT's release shattered whatever hopes remained of achieving the Singleton scenario, the hope that a single, safety-minded lab could develop artificial general intelligence on behalf of all humanity. The second hour picks up with the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in November of 2022, and what it revealed about the state of the AI race, including Sebastian's assessment of Sam Altman and the character of the individuals now driving this technology forward. We examine the question of whether personality and values actually matter when competitive and commercial pressures are this overwhelming, and revisit a conversation that Sebastian had with Geoffrey Hinton, so-called Godfather of AI, in which he offered his honest assessment of whether humanity is going to make it through the AI transition. We also explore why the AI safety and risk conversation has receded from public discourse, not because the concerns have been resolved, but because geopolitical and commercial pressures have made it nearly impossible to slow down. We also consider alternative perspectives, from Metta's Yann LeCun's dismissiveness of existential risk, to the technical alignment approaches being pursued inside the major labs themselves. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe, and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode, right now. If you want to join in on the conversation, and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like early-to-mid dinners, and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email, the info at hiddenforces.io, and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly important and informative conversation about the most important technology of our time with my guest, Sebastian Mallaby.
Sebastian Mallaby, welcome back to Hidden Forces.

**Sebastian Mallaby** (3:56)
So great to be here.

**Demetri Kofinas** (3:57)
It's great to see you, though not in person this time. How you been?

**Sebastian Mallaby** (4:01)
Oh, I've been having a great time. We're going to discuss it, but to be embedded inside an AI lab right when ChatGP gets released, it's pretty good.

**Demetri Kofinas** (4:10)
So this is what? Your fifth book, your sixth book, I've lost track.

**Sebastian Mallaby** (4:13)
This is number six. Yeah. I'm a repeat offender.

**Demetri Kofinas** (4:17)
And you've been on the show two previous times. The first time you were on was way back in the early days of the program and you had just published a book on Alan Greenspan's career, his life and times. And then you came back on to discuss the Power Law, which is a book on the venture capital industry. Almost all your previous books, with maybe the exception of After Apartheid, seem to be either primarily biographies, The Man Who Knew, which I just mentioned in this latest book, The Affinity Machine, qualify, or historical accounts of institutions or industries in which key figures play a defining role, such as with More Money Than God and The Power Law. But even in this book and in your biography of Alan Greenspan, the main character is used to tell a much bigger story. What is it about you, your interests, your curiosities, your nature, the questions that make you feel alive and that align with your life's mission and purpose that might explain to someone looking from the outside why you've chosen to write the books that you've written?