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  • Published: 9 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837313648
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

The Infinity Machine

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence



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.

  • Published: 9 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837313648
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

Sebastian Mallaby

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of several books including the The Power Law, More Money Than God and The Man Who Knew, which won the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. A former Financial Times contributing editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Praise for The Infinity Machine

In this deeply reported and profoundly insightful book, Sebastian Mallaby chronicles the brilliant Demis Hassabis and the company he cofounded ... a colourful and engrossing tale but also a sophisticated description of how AI developed

Walter Isaacson, author of <i> Elon Musk </i>

An extraordinary portrait of our age – beautifully written, clear-eyed and engaged in the deepest ethical questions of our day

Rory Stewart

Sebastian Mallaby has tunnelled deeply into one of the most influential artificial intelligence projects of our time. It's an entrancing and revealing journey … at once inspiring and terrifying

Steve Coll, author of <i> The Achilles Trap </i>

Captures the extraordinary drama of the high-stakes AI arms race ... a gripping story about ambition colliding with ethics at the frontier of machine intelligence

Chris Miller, author of <i> Chip War </i>

With his customary flair, Sebastian Mallaby relays the enchanting tale of how the British son of a Chinese Singaporean mother and Greek Cypriot father led google to pole position in the AI race and picked up a Nobel prize along the way

Michael Moritz, author of <i> Leading </i>

A truly revealing window into the biggest business phenomenon of our age … a quest for superhuman intelligence that already has far outraced the ideals and imaginings of its human creators

Margaret O’Mara, author of <i> The Code </i>

The Infinity Machine will teach you a lot about AI, and how human ability, vision, and tenacity remake the world

Andrew McAfee, author of <i> The Geek Way </i>
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