Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early (#870)

Sebastian Mallaby, author of 'The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence,' discusses insights from over 100 AI insiders on the race to superintelligence, the religious fervor around AI, and how to spot breakthroughs early in a podcast episode.

Sebastian Mallaby @scmallaby https://x.com/scmallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics https://www.cfr.org/paul-volcker-chair-international-economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of six books, including More Money Than God , The Power Law , The Man Who Knew , and The World’s Banker . His latest book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence . Please enjoy This episode is brought to you by: Eight Sleep Pod Cover 5 sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: EightSleep.com/Tim AG1 Pro all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/Tim Wealthfront high-yield cash account: Wealthfront.com/Tim Additional podcast platforms Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Transcripts - This episode coming soon All episodes https://tim.blog/2018/09/20/all-transcripts-from-the-tim-ferriss-show/ Show Notes - Connect with Sebastian Mallaby: Books The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593831845/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Sebastian Mallaby More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594202559/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Sebastian Mallaby The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future https://www.amazon.com/dp/052555999X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Sebastian Mallaby Ender’s Game https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812550706/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Orson Scott Card The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes—and Its Implications https://www.amazon.com/dp/014027541X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by David Deutsch Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Douglas Hofstadter The Organization Man https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812218191/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by William H. Whyte Recommended Reading, Watching, & Listening Demis Hassabis: How AI Is Unlocking the Secrets of Nature and the Universe https://www.ted.com/talks/demis hassabis how ai is unlocking the secrets of nature and the universe | TED Talk Silicon Valley’s Obsession with AI Looks a Lot Like Religion https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/silicon-valleys-obsession-with-ai-looks-a-lot-like-religion | The MIT Press Reader OpenAI Employees Say Firm’s Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims https://futurism.com/openai-employees-say-firms-chief-scientist-has-been-making-strange-spiritual-claims | Futurism DeepMind’s Shane Legg on Machine Super Intelligence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFgJHzliy94 | The Artificial Intelligence Channel The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade https://www.nber.org/papers/w21906 | National Bureau of Economic Research Why Neural Net Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton Is Sounding the Alarm on AI https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/why-neural-net-pioneer-geoffrey-hinton-sounding-alarm-ai | MIT Sloan Existential Risk from Artificial General Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential risk from artificial general intelligence | Wikipedia Anthropic Pulls Its Most Powerful AI Models After US Bars Foreign Access https://time.com/article/2026/06/13/anthropic-fable-mythos-ban-US-security/ | Time This Is What Convinced Me OpenAI Will Run Out of Money https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/opinion/openai-ai-bubble-financing.html by Sebastian Mallaby | The New York Times A Rational Conversation on Where AI Is Actually Going with Benedict Evans https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-rational-conversation-on-where | Lenny’s Podcast Benedict’s Newsletter https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter | Benedict Evans Sebastian Mallaby on Why the U.S. and China Need to Talk Seriously About AI Safety https://www.thewirechina.com/2026/05/10/sebastian-mallaby-on-why-the-u-s-and-china-need-to-talk-seriously-about-ai-safety/ | The Wire China Biden Needs Allies to Keep China and Russia in Check. Here’s How to Do It. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/05/biden-foreign-policy-china-russia-free-trade/ by Sebastian Mallaby | The Washington Post U.S.-China AI Race Escalates + Chip Bans Aren’t Working: A Lesson from Nuclear Proliferation https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/spillover/u-s-china-ai-race-escalates-chip-bans-arent-working-a-lesson-from-nuclear-proliferation | Council on Foreign Relations The Spillover The U.S.-China Economic Cold War, with Sebastian Mallaby https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/us-china-economic-cold-war-sebastian-mallaby | Council on Foreign Relations The President’s Inbox Khrushchev Loses His Cool https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1843506 1843505 1843496,00.html | Time Sebastian Mallaby on AI Safety and the Race for Superintelligence https://www.persuasion.community/p/sebastian-mallaby | The Good Fight Podcast Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for More Than $500M https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/ | TechCrunch Has AI Already Killed How-to Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future https://tim.blog/2026/06/12/has-ai-already-killed-nonfiction/ | Tim Ferriss The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 AlphaFold — Hassabis, Jumper, and Baker https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/ | The Nobel Prize Flagship Pioneering Unveils Lila Sciences to Build Superintelligence in Science https://www.flagshippioneering.com/news/press-release/flagship-pioneering-unveils-lila-sciences-to-build-superintelligence-in-science | Flagship Pioneering “In the Fields of Observation, Chance Favors Only the Prepared Mind.” — https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis Pasteur Louis Pasteur https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis Pasteur | Wikiquote Malcolm Butler’s Game-Sealing Interception in Super Bowl XLIX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJnsU6wqTNM | NFL Films What if Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/what-if-readers-like-ai-generated-fiction by Vauhini Vara | The New Yorker Relevant Tim Ferriss Show Episodes Legendary Investor Bill Gurley on Investing Rules, Finding Outliers, Insights from Jeff Bezos and Howard Marks, Must-Read Books, Creating True Competitive Advantages, and More https://tim.blog/2023/01/25/bill-gurley-transcript/ | The Tim Ferriss Show 651 Bill Gurley — Investing in the AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons https://tim.blog/2025/12/17/bill-gurley-running-down-a-dream-transcript/ | The Tim Ferriss Show 840 Max Levchin, PayPal, and Affirm — The Path from the Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies https://tim.blog/2026/06/10/max-levchin-2/ | The Tim Ferriss Show 869 Films People Sam Altman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam Altman Dario Amodei https://www.darioamodei.com/ Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/ Joe Biden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe Biden Napoleon Bonaparte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon Nick Bostrom https://nickbostrom.com/ Greg Brockman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg Brockman Malcolm Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm Butler Orson Scott Card https://www.hatrack.com/ David Deutsch https://tim.blog/2023/03/23/david-deutsch-naval-ravikant/ John Doerr https://tim.blog/2021/11/03/john-doerr/ Benedict Evans https://www.ben-evans.com/ David Gammon https://raeng.org.uk/about-us/fellowship/new-fellows-2017/david-gammon/ Bill Gurley https://tim.blog/2025/12/17/bill-gurley-running-down-a-dream/ HAL 9000 https://2001.fandom.com/wiki/HAL 9000 Demis Hassabis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis Hassabis Geoffrey Hinton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey Hinton Douglas Hofstadter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas Hofstadter Sebastian Junger https://tim.blog/2021/05/11/sebastian-junger-freedom/ Travis Kalanick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis Kalanick Dara Khosrowshahi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dara Khosrowshahi Nikita Khrushchev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita Khrushchev Yann LeCun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann LeCun Shane Legg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane Legg Anthony Levandowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony Levandowski Max Levchin https://tim.blog/2026/06/10/max-levchin-2/ Dustin Moskovitz https://tim.blog/2023/08/10/dustin-moskovitz-2/ Elon Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon Musk Luke Nosek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke Nosek Louis Pasteur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis Pasteur Arthur Patterson https://www.accel.com/team/arthur-patterson Lenny Rachitsky https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/ Alec Radford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec Radford Kevin Rose https://tim.blog/2025/12/03/the-random-show-with-kevin-rose-2/ Ilya Sutskever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya Sutskever Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/ Leo Tolstoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo Tolstoy Donald Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald Trump Vauhini Vara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauhini Vara Cathie Wood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathie Wood Xi Jinping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi Jinping Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/ Companies & Organizations Accel https://www.accel.com/ Alphabet https://abc.xyz/ Ant Group https://www.antgroup.com/ Anthropic https://www.anthropic.com/ ARK Invest https://www.ark-invest.com/ Benchmark https://www.benchmark.com/ DocuSign https://www.docusign.com/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ Fairchild Semiconductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild Semiconductor Founders Fund https://foundersfund.com/ Genentech https://www.genentech.com/ Google DeepMind https://deepmind.google/ Hikvision https://www.hikvision.com/ Huawei https://www.huawei.com/ Lila Sciences https://www.lila.ai/ Mailchimp https://mailchimp.com/ Meta https://www.meta.com/ Mistral https://mistral.ai/ OpenAI https://openai.com/ OpenTable https://www.opentable.com/ Palantir https://www.palantir.com/ PayPal https://www.paypal.com/ Saudi Aramco https://www.aramco.com/ Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory SpaceX https://www.spacex.com/ Stargate Project https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ Uber https://www.uber.com/ Waymo https://waymo.com/ X https://x.com/ formerly Twitter Institutions Council on Foreign Relations https://www.cfr.org/ International Atomic Energy Agency https://www.iaea.org/ Milken Institute Global Conference https://milkeninstitute.org/ Stanford University https://www.stanford.edu/ World Trade Organization https://www.wto.org/ AI Systems & Tools AlphaFold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold AlphaGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/ OpenAI Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5 Anthropic Cloud TPUs https://cloud.google.com/tpu Gemini https://gemini.google.com/ Google Gmail https://gmail.com/ Google Maps https://maps.google.com/ Google Workspace https://workspace.google.com/ “G Suite” Sora https://openai.com/sora OpenAI Concepts AI Winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI winter Artificial General Intelligence AGI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial general intelligence Bayh–Dole Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole Act The China Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China shock Cuban Missile Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban Missile Crisis Cultural Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural Revolution Garden Leave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden leave Paperclip Maximizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental convergence Paperclip maximizer / Instrumental Convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental convergence Pentamind World Championship, Mind Sports Olympiad https://mindsportsolympiad.com/pentamind-world-championship/ Recursive Self-Improvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive self-improvement Super Bowl XLIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super Bowl XLIX The Traitorous Eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous eight Transformer Architecture https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 “Attention Is All You Need” Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons NPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Vibe Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe coding Timestamps - 00:00:00 Start. - 00:02:11 The twinkly eyed polymath who became Sebastian’s next book. - 00:06:55 Picking the next book project the way a great VC picks a startup. - 00:09:41 Why God keeps crashing the superintelligence party. - 00:11:13 Shane Legg’s grainy 2009 prophecy — and the nervous giggle. - 00:13:11 Ilya Sutskever burns an effigy. - 00:13:54 Demis at 4 a.m., hunting God’s algorithm. - 00:18:43 Super-abundance, Mad Max , and the China shock lesson. - 00:22:39 The kitchen debate with Geoff Hinton that flipped Sebastian. - 00:24:06 Why a zero-percent chance of doom is indefensible. - 00:24:52 Will Washington seize the labs? The Mythos wake-up call. - 00:27:18 Anthropic’s bull case, bear case, and a dead parent’s letter. - 00:33:24 Where Sebastian and Benedict Evans part ways. - 00:38:16 Is the SaaS apocalypse overdone? One word: Palantir. - 00:39:53 The AI friend you’ll never switch. - 00:41:56 Does Google win consumer AI by default? - 00:44:45 Four cities, eight days: China actually talks safety. - 00:47:28 A Cold War non-proliferation playbook for AI. - 00:49:45 Did the chip export controls actually work? - 00:51:49 Burned doves: why Washington swears China won’t talk. - 00:54:56 “By 2028, the race is over” — one lab boss’ bet. - 00:59:11 Inside Hikvision: toddlers, sensors, and US sanctions. - 01:01:07 Bill Gurley’s Uber bet: venture capital perfected. - 01:05:18 Luke Nosek bear-hugs DeepMind into existence. - 01:10:52 Thiel’s heresy: never invest by committee. - 01:11:59 How Founders Fund nearly fumbled the deal of the century. - 01:14:30 Selling to Google for $650M: a secret British heist? - 01:16:41 The Traitorous Eight, gardening leave, and the UK’s to-do list. - 01:20:55 Ender’s Game : “That’s really how I see myself.” - 01:23:42 Too dumb for Gödel, Escher, Bach ? Maybe an LLM can help. - 01:25:19 If not Demis or Sam, then Dario. - 01:26:04 My royalties cliff — and what dropped in late 2022. - 01:27:47 Lila Sciences and the labs that run themselves. - 01:31:13 Sebastian’s billboard: “Prepare your mind.” - 01:35:14 The one thing Sebastian will never outsource to AI. - 01:40:09 Parting thoughts. Sebastian Mallaby Quotes from the Interview “These machines will be smarter than us. They will want to survive and they can be deceptive, they can obfuscate, they can go behind your back, pretend they’re doing one thing and then actually do another. All of this has been shown in all the tests of the models. And so we put those things together, I think your probability of doom cannot be zero.” — Sebastian Mallaby “For humans, to contemplate annihilation is absurd and the absurd is a close cousin of humor.” — Sebastian Mallaby “All through this topic there is this religious expression because religion is the lexicon for dealing with something that we find too mysterious to really understand.” — Sebastian Mallaby “I think any reasonable person should be both excited and a bit frightened, and that’s just the nature of it. It sounds contradictory, but actually, that’s the only rational response.” — Sebastian Mallaby “We only need to be ahead for the next couple of years, because by 2028 we will get to recursive self-improvement, where the frontier model codes, by itself, the next frontier model, and progress just goes vertical, and at that point with recursive self-improvement, we’re done. The race is over. Whoever comes first at that point, that’s it.” — Sebastian Mallaby Related Episode Want to hear another conversation with a legendary investor mapping the AI race and the US–China contest? Listen to my conversation with Benchmark general partner , in which we discussed the https://tim.blog/2025/12/17/bill-gurley-running-down-a-dream/ Bill Gurley AI bubble debate, circular deals and SPV chaos, angel investing in the AI era, his ten-day deep dive across six Chinese cities, the Xiaomi SU7 factory tour, Lei Jun as “the Steve Jobs of China,” America vs. China lawyers vs. engineers , regulatory capture , why the IPO market is broken, stablecoins putting Visa and Mastercard on notice, and much more https://tim.blog/2025/12/17/bill-gurley-running-down-a-dream/ . This episode is brought to you by AG1 I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim , my all-in-one nutritional insurance. 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