What’s it with the savior narrative? Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) asks if one decent man can steer AI development. It’s good on the philosophy and the personalities, less good on the hard questions. At times the awestruck tone is difficult to swallow. (Gideon Lichfield, The Economist)
- Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 on the theory that an AI teaching itself to play games would develop the kind of general problem-solving that could eventually crack science, a bet that paid off with a 2024 Nobel prize for solving protein folding.
- DeepMind's early dismissal of transformers, the architecture behind ChatGPT, left Google flat-footed when OpenAI launched in 2022, despite Google having invented the transformer in the first place.
- Mallaby had front-row access during DeepMind's scramble to pivot from pure research lab to building Gemini, but the book largely takes Hassabis's self-justifications at face value and barely engages with Anthropic's Dario Amodei, who is equally vocal on AI risk.
- The most useful detail for journalists covering AI leadership: even the book's sympathetic case for Hassabis as the industry's conscience lands on a quietly defeatist note, quoting Hinton's observation that the prospect of discovery is simply too sweet for any scientist to stop, ethical qualms or not.
