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An intimate portrait of the world’s most brilliant tech visionary and his game-changing company DeepMind, from award-winning financial journalist and historian Sebastian Mallaby

Even by the standards of an industry stacked with so-called visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. His journey to pursue the dream of super-human intelligence has taken him from working-class origins in North London to the founding of revolutionary AI company DeepMind to a Nobel Prize. Unlike many of his Silicon Valley peers, his goals are not money and power but scientific enlightenment.

For the past several years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind. In The Infinity Machine, he offers an unrivalled window into the AI revolution, a transformation potentially more significant than any since we gained a capacity for abstract thought 70,000 years ago. DeepMind is locked in an arms race to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby to become the keeper of humanity’s future. But, like his rivals, Hassabis is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. His goal is to build and control the technology. But the technology may ultimately control him—and humanity writ large.

© Sebastian Mallaby 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026