It was March 2016, and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the world was gathered to watch the culmination of a battle 2,500 years in the making. On one side was the South Korean Lee Se-dol, the second-highest ranking Go player in the world. On the other was AlphaGo – a computer program developed by London-based artificial intelligence research company DeepMind.
“Chess is the greatest game mankind has invented,” game designer Alex Randolph once said. “Go is the greatest game mankind has discovered.” Something about the ancient Chinese duel, where players place stones on a grid, trying to capture territory, feels fundamental – inevitable, even. Chess had fallen to the robots nearly 20 years earlier, when DeepBlue beat Kasparov, but Go, with its vast decision space (there are far more legal board positions than atoms in the observable universe) remained a plucky holdout.
Over five matches, watched by more than 200 million people globally, DeepMind won four games to one. After his third loss, Lee Se-dol apologised: “I, Lee Se-dol, lost, but mankind did not.” The real winner was DeepMind and its CEO, Demis Hassabis.
The Infinity Machine is a detailed account of Hassabis’s journey from chess prodigy to the driving force behind a global leader in AI technology. Parts of this journey are rather remarkable. His Chinese Singaporean mother, we are told, “grew up in absolute poverty”, spending part of her childhood as an orphan on the streets of Singapore, while his Greek Cypriot father had dreams of music stardom and “sold toys out of the back of a beaten-up red Volkswagen van”.
Hassabis was unusually bright from an early age. He started playing chess – and beating adults – at four. By five, he was competing in tournaments, sitting on a phone book on top of two stacked chairs so he could see the table. By nine, he was captain of the England under-11 team. By 13, he had achieved the rank of chess master and was the second-strongest player in his age group globally.
It was an intensely pressured environment – wooden boards were placed under the tables “to prevent players from kicking each other”. If Hassabis lost, his dad frequently “went mental”, screaming at him, and when he counselled him to “do his best”, Hassabis took it literally; the only way he’d know he’d succeeded was if he exerted himself to near-collapse – “basically if I pushed myself to the point just before death”.
After a stint at Bullfrog games, working on the wildly successful Theme Park under designer Peter Molyneux, Hassabis studied at Cambridge, founded his own game studio, then returned to academia to complete a PhD in neuroscience. In 2010, along with his friend Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg, whom he met as a postdoc, he founded DeepMind.
DeepMind’s precise mission shifted depending on who they were pitching to. Soon, they got an audience with Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and the governmental and military surveillance company Palantir, who hooked them up with investment. Thiel went on to become a Maga eminence grise who oversaw JD Vance’s ascent to power and now tours the podcast circuit explaining that big tech is the only way to combat the rise of the antichrist.
Thiel’s views look positively pedestrian in the weird, feverish bubble of tech finance, especially among those lured by the carrot Hassabis was dangling – AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, an ability to meet or beat human performance across every major cognitive domain. “It’s really finding God’s algorithm,” said one investor.
This world of hype and speculation is both fascinating and horrifying, but unfortunately, Mallaby appears unwilling or unable to engage critically with his interviewees’ claims. “Artificial intelligence,” he writes, “heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought.” No it doesn’t, Sebastian. More profound than agriculture? More profound than language?
Certainly, people such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – who appears largely in this book as a cynical and cavalier wrecker, stealing DeepMind’s thunder by releasing ChatGPT before anyone else was ready – would like us to believe we’re on the verge of something unimaginably consequential. How else can they source investment to build more loss-making, drought-causing, energy-hungry datacentres? The Singularity is just over the next hill.Mallaby’s prose is tortuous and intrusive throughout. No one is permitted to have merely “said” something – rather, they “confessed”, “added”, “declared”, “concluded”, “reflected”, “fretted”, “vowed earnestly”. This cavalcade of purple dialogue tags may reflect an unconscious attempt to jazz up various interviewees’ contributions, most of which, including those from the (perfectly nice-seeming) Hassabis, are rather dull.
“Doing science is, sort of, like reading the mind of God,” Hassabis tells a credulous Mallaby. “Understanding the deep mystery of the universe is my religion, kind of.” Sort of. Kind of. These hedging phrases all but give the game away, the sly hitching of the actual to the notionally adjacent but thematically sexy. It’s instructive that Hassabis began his life in computing as the protege of Molyneux, a man notorious for making big promises about the depth and innovation of upcoming titles such as Black & White (which would go on to earn the dubious accolade of “most overrated game of all time”).
Perhaps anticipating that – given the reputation of men such as Thiel and Elon Musk – the public’s thirst for tech CEO hagiography is on the wane, Mallaby reassures readers that “For every Donald Trump supporter in the tech industry … there is also a Bill Gates” – a comparison that, since the release of Gates’s email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein, reveals rather more than Mallaby intended.
Hassabis comes across as far less objectionable than these people, but remains an underwhelming protagonist. Mallaby’s focus on interminable dinners and wrangles over management structure, while faithful to the reality of running a tech startup, chokes out Hassabis’s impressive achievements, such as receiving the Nobel prize for chemistry with John Jumper for their work adapting DeepMind to predict protein structures. This is precisely the kind of research – miles from tech-bro hype about building God or founding quasi-libertarian AI-run fiefdoms – that could actually change lives.
Sadly, Mallaby mistakes Hassabis’s intelligence in one field – computing – for general brilliance across all domains, treating his half-formed pub takes on the nature of reality and aspirations to build a Large Hadron Collider as if they were revelatory dispatches. “I am really a practical philosopher,” Hassabis tells him. “I’m not just sitting there thinking … I’m also doing experiments. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Sort of. Kind of.
• The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
