The Infinity Machine

Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

About

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence is Sebastian Mallaby‘s reported history of the modern artificial-intelligence race, told through the life and career of Demis Hassabis — the chess-prodigy-turned-neuroscientist who founded DeepMind in London in 2010, sold it to Google in 2014, and won a Nobel Prize for the protein-folding system AlphaFold. Published by Penguin Press in 2026, it follows the pattern of Mallaby’s earlier books (More Money Than God, The Power Law): a single figure in the foreground, the industry and its ideas in the landscape behind.

The book’s throughline is a tension between ambition and restraint. Mallaby presents Hassabis as a scientist whose deepest motive is discovery rather than power or profit — a man who calls Isaac Newton ‘a failure’ for not grasping the whole fabric of reality, and who set out to build the tool that would take him further. Yet that same figure is, in Mallaby’s telling, a good person who wants to make AI safe and cannot, because a competitive race between labs is a race to the bottom: any one lab that restrains itself simply loses to those that do not. The reporting draws on internal DeepMind material, including documents on the safety-oversight fights, and leans on the Oppenheimer parallel — the sense of a small group of people with their hands on the 21st-century equivalent of nuclear material.

In the wiki

• The Modern Oppenheimer, Demis Hassabis, and the Quest for Superintelligence — the book’s own launch episode. On The Spillover, Rebecca Patterson interviews Sebastian Mallaby about it: why Hassabis, the un-famous ‘OG’ of modern AI, is a truer protagonist than Sam Altman; the science-as-spiritual-quest motive (‘reality was screaming at him… discover me, discover me’); AlphaFold and Isomorphic Labs as the clearly-beneficial applications AI needs to win public acceptance; and the race-to-the-bottom argument that safety cannot be self-imposed.
• Sebastian Mallaby on OpenAI's Cash Crunch, the AI Bubble Debate, and the China AI Race — Mallaby draws on the same reporting (100-plus AI insiders) for his OpenAI-bubble and US–China arguments.
• Author hub: Sebastian Mallaby. Subject: Demis Hassabis.