The Infinity Machine: The Untold Story of Demis Hassabis and DeepMind

**Sebastian Mallaby** (0:00)
These machines are going to be smarter than us. They are going to have a survival instinct, because that will be coded into them through the way they are trained.
And they are duplicitous. They don't tell the truth to human users all the time.

**Peter High** (0:14)
Welcome to Technovation. I'm Peter High, President of Metis Strategy.
My guest today is Sebastian Mallaby. Sebastian is one of the world's foremost business historians and financial journalists. He is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, the former Financial Times Contributing Editor and a long-time columnist for The Economist and The Washington Post and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Sebastian is the author of six acclaimed books, including The World's Banker, More Money Than God, The Man Who Knew, and The Power Law, which examined the history of venture capital and the firms that shape Silicon Valley. His latest book, The Infinity Machine, I've got it here, a phenomenal read, it chronicles the remarkable story of Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the global race to build artificial general intelligence. It draws upon more than 30 hours of interviews with Hassabis himself in conversations with more than 100 colleagues, competitors, friends, and the book explores not only the evolution of DeepMind, but also the scientific, commercial, and ethical questions surrounding perhaps the most consequential technology of our time.
In today's conversation, we'll discuss Sebastian's deep reporting on Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, what distinguishes the pursuit of AGI from earlier waves of AI, the leadership and culture that enable DeepMind's breakthroughs, and what the race toward super intelligence may mean for business, science, and society, more generally speaking, among other topics I'm sure we will tackle together. Sebastian, welcome to Technovation. It's so great to speak with you today.

**Sebastian Mallaby** (1:37)
Yeah, same with you. Great to be here.

**Peter High** (1:41)
Today's episode is brought to you by ElevenLabs. Most enterprises trying to deploy AI agents hit the same wall. The agent itself is fine. The problem is that it sounds wrong. Robotic, flat, off-brand, and the moment a customer notices, the trust is gone. ElevenLabs develops the AI voice and audio models that give agents a human-level voice, the tone, the emotion, the rhythm of real speech, and wraps them in the full stack you need to actually deploy. Knowledge integrations, workflow tooling, multilingual support, and enterprise-grade reliability. Build human-level conversational experiences into your products, services, and operations. Head to elevenlabs.io/technovation to get started for free.
And now on to the interview. Wonderful. Well, let's begin with the genesis of this project if you don't mind, Sebastian.
In some ways, very logical to go from venture capital, the subject of your last book, which by the way, fun fact, is the yellow book right for those who can see this. That's the power law. Forgive me that it's not more prominently shown, but which I thoroughly enjoyed. It has become a classic tome on the history and the present of venture capital to artificial intelligence, where it seems like such a preponderance of venture capital is now flowing.
But how did you choose this topic, Demis more specifically, DeepMind? Talk a bit about the early stages of this project if you would.

**Sebastian Mallaby** (3:06)
Sure. At a high level, the books I've done have pretty much all been an attempt to grapple with something which is going to drive how the world works, a kind of political economy writ large. They need to have two things. They need to have a meaty subject, but also a fascinating character.
Sometimes it's a cast of characters, not just one character. So with the power law, there are multiple different venture capitalists, depending on the time period I'm describing, who I pin the story on. But you do need, I think, character to drive stories, partly just because character is fun, but also because I majored in history many moons ago at Oxford University. That kind of debate about, do individuals shape history or are there deeper ineluctable forces, technological change, demographic change, what have you, which really drive outcomes? My view is the answer is both. So you want to get that interplay between the individual and the deeper forces. Or as my editor says, you paint the figure, but you also want the landscape behind the figure. So that's kind of the big frame. And so I was always looking for something which had both of that. And I'd been to tech conferences while I was doing the book on Silicon Valley and venture capital. And when these conferences were in Europe, there would often be this friendly character who showed up with a kind of guy next door grin and a very unassuming, very boyish young look. And this character was called Demis Hassabis. I probably mispronounced his name at first. Demis Hassabis is a common error. After a while, I figured out how to put emphasis on the right syllable.