Sebastian Mallaby: The Infinity Machine

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Apr 19, 2026

Sebastian Mallaby, journalist and author who writes on finance and technology, discusses DeepMind’s rise and Demis Hassabis’s role. He covers AlphaGo’s pivotal win, the AlphaFold leap into biology, DeepMind’s mix of deep learning and reinforcement learning, and how missing the transformer revolution opened the door for rivals. They also tackle the AI arms race, safety dilemmas, and parallels to historical scientific crossroads.

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INSIGHT

Induction Requires An Infinity Of Data

AI excels at induction, requiring vast amounts of examples rather than pure deduction.
Sebastian Mallaby names this need for an "infinity of data" the reason DeepMind sought systems that master induction, inspiring the book title The Infinity Machine.

ANECDOTE

DeepMind Founded Years Before The Deep Learning Boom

Demis Hassabis founded DeepMind in 2010, years before the 2012 ImageNet deep-learning breakthrough.
DeepMind's early business plan even projected superintelligence rapidly, showing prescience by aiming far ahead of mainstream AI timelines.

ANECDOTE

AlphaGo Win Sparked AlphaFold Ambition

On the day AlphaGo clinched its win over Lee Sedol, Demis immediately proposed tackling protein folding next.
That spontaneous pivot led to AlphaFold, which later achieved transformative protein-structure predictions.

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This is one of my favorite books over recent years. Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Cocker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations and author of 6 bestselling books.

THE INFINITY MACHINE tells the story of AI’s progress over the past 15 years largely, but not exclusively, from Demis Hassabis as the protagonist and leader of DeepMind’, with its 2010 mission statement to achieve superintelligence by 2030. It’s a rich, informative, page turner.

What We Discussed:

—What is an Infinity Machine?

—Influence of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory and Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach

—Origin of DeepMind in 2010. Prescient. Charter, business plan, included use of agents. How Demis Hassabis was made for the mission!

—Contrasts with Sam Altman and the other AI leaders, the Oligopoly (cover of The Economist this week). For example, Nature papers vs white papers on company websites.

—In March 2016, the same day when DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, Hassabis says it’s time to do protein folding (later known as AlphaFold).

—Symbolic AI (historic, deductive, rule-based) vs Deep Learning (Toronto tribe) and Reinforcement Learning (Alberta tribe).

—The Big Miss: DeepMind’s lack of early recognition of the importance of transformer models (leading to ChatGPT), creating a big opening for OpenAI. And why was this missed? The Comeback Story. Is this happening again with coding (not in the book)?

—The AI Arms Race and Hyperscaling

—How the complex relationship between Google and DeepMind evolved

—The Double Cross

—With the dangers anticipated (parallels to Oppenheimer, Manhattan Project, and the atomic bomb), how to promote AI safety?

—Is the major build up of data centers justified?

Thank you Bob Fleischman, Jeanie, Ruben Max, FelonBroke America, Seitzinator ❌👑, and more than 600 others for tuning into our live video with Sebastian Mallaby! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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