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The Infinity Machine

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence

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The Infinity Machine

Written by: Sebastian Mallaby
Narrated by: Vidish Athavale
Free with 30-day trial

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Buy Now for ₹670.93

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 goal: 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.

'Extraordinary... beautifully written, clear-eyed and engaged in the deepest ethical questions of our day' Rory Stewart

© Sebastian Mallaby 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

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Critic Reviews

The highest praise for The Infinity Machine is to say that 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)
When it comes to recounting the scientific challenges, Mallaby captures wonderfully the tension, the excitement and the joy (Tom Whipple)
With unprecedented access, Mallaby had a front row seat... what results is a rich and clearly written account (Gideon Lichfield)
An extraordinary portrait of our age – beautifully written, clear-eyed and engaged in the deepest ethical questions of our day (Rory Stewart)
Gripping, absolutely of the moment... I loved it because it's filled with really important ideas about how this wave of AI is changing our economy... but it's also got the element of a thriller (Robert Peston)
A hugely acclaimed recent book…a lot of people are talking about (Amol Rajan)
Fascinating (Fareed Zakaria)
In this deeply reported and profoundly insightful book, Sebastian Mallaby chronicles the brilliant Demis Hassabis and the company he cofounded ... a colourful and engrossing tale but also a sophisticated description of how AI developed (Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk )
Sebastian Mallaby has tunnelled deeply into one of the most influential artificial intelligence projects of our time. It's an entrancing and revealing journey … at once inspiring and terrifying (Steve Coll, author of The Achilles Trap )
Captures the extraordinary drama of the high-stakes AI arms race ... a gripping story about ambition colliding with ethics at the frontier of machine intelligence (Chris Miller, author of Chip War )
All stars
Most relevant
The book shedded lights on the other sides of AI beyond the chaos and arms race covered by conventional media and social media. It gives a ringside view of Deepmind’s quest for AGI. Very rare peek inside the AI scientists community’s thoughts and actions. After listening to this book the race for AGI and hostility among front runners suddenly started to make sense. A must have for someone who is interested in AI.

Outstanding!

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