The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

The opening chapters follow a five-year-old through chess tournaments with the same seriousness later spent on boardrooms: "rarely is the childhood portion of a biography as gripping as this one, which recounts stories of his chess prowess at age five with the same intensity as the later chapters," one reader writes. That evenness lets Mallaby hold games, neuroscience, and Nobel-level chemistry in one frame; a critic says he "has done full justice to his kaleidoscopically interesting subject." The AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol is the best set piece, "the intense prep work, the jitters, Sedol's incredulousness at what just happened, and his retirement 3 years later," and the twenty-year wait for AlphaFold shows the method connecting it all: reduce every bet to "whether the underlying problem has actually been solved."

Thirty hours of interviews with the subject bought remarkable access, and the bill comes due in the tone. Chapters arrive titled "Destiny" and "The Jedi," and one reader quit three chapters in; another writes, "Breathless corporate hagiography. Hard to read." The reverence costs the book its reporting: Mallaby declines to push back on his interviewees, skates past the years when rival labs shipped DeepMind's own research into products first, and waves off the live fight over models trained on scraped work. When the material turns technical the prose just gets denser, not clearer. And on the ethics of building superintelligence, the question a reader actually shows up with: "It raises hard questions, then leaves you empty-handed."