Inside The Infinity Machine ft Sebastian Mallaby

About this episode

Sebastian Mallaby discusses his book on Demis Hassabis and the evolution of AI at DeepMind.

There's a book about artificial intelligence that doesn't start with Sam Altman. It doesn't start with Elon Musk. It starts in 1994, at Cambridge, where a teenager named Demis Hassabis is reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and concluding, before most of his professors would have agreed, that first-order logic can't be the full answer to building intelligence. Sebastian Mallaby spent years inside that story. His new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, is the most serious attempt yet to explain not just what AI is, but why the people building it can't stop. His answer draws on a line Jeff Hinton borrowed from Robert Oppenheimer: invention is sweet. A scientist, given the chance to build something, simply cannot resist. The consequences come later. In this conversation, Mallaby joins Josh Tyson and Robb Wilson to explore the full sweep of the Demis Hassabis story — from game designer to neuroscientist to Nobel laureate to the man running Google's flagship AI lab. They talk about why DeepMind was built the way it was, with neuroscientists and physicists and probabilistic mathematicians before AI was even a field, and how that…

People in this episode

Guest: Sebastian Mallaby

Topics covered

• artificial intelligence
• technology
• business
• neuroscience
• design

Keywords

• The Infinity Machine
• Demis Hassabis
• DeepMind
• superintelligence
• Nobel laureate
• Go champion
• cross-disciplinary foundation

Mentioned in this episode

Products: DeepMind, Go, GSX

Books & works: Inside The Infinity Machine, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, Nobel, Age of Invisible Machines

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