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Demis Hassabis and the Race to Build AI with Sebastian Mallaby
Tuesday, 3 November, 2026
Demis Hassabis founded DeepMind in 2010, before machines could reliably tell a cat from a dog. He believed that artificial general intelligence was achievable, and that it should be built safely and deliberately. Along the way, Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, the system that cracked the fifty-year problem of predicting protein structures. Fifteen years on, the LLM race has erupted across rival labs and countries, and AI has become one of the most consequential and contested technologies of the era. Sebastian Mallaby is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a longtime chronicler of the collision between innovation and capital, from hedge funds to central banking to Silicon Valley. His latest book, The Infinity Machine, is a portrait of Hassabis and DeepMind built on more than thirty hours of candid conversation, beginning just as ChatGPT set off the AI frenzy, and drawing as well on Hassabis’s estranged cofounder, his rivals, and academic pioneers who now fear for human survival. Mallaby is also the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. In this episode, Sebastian joins Kevin Ball to talk about Demis Hassabis and the founding of DeepMind, the pioneering breakthroughs that followed, and how the field arrived at the current moment in AI.Photo by Jeremy Sherlick The post Demis Hassabis and the Race to Build AI with Sebastian Mallaby appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
