Snr Fellow @CFR_org. Book: THE INFINITY MACHINE: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. Podcast: The Spillover. RTntEndst. Opin mine.
Joined December 2011
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Mar 18
Proving it is better to be lucky than smart, I negotiated deep access to Demis Hassabis and DeepMind in November 2022. A week later, ChatGPT launched, and I began my deep-dive conversations with Demis and his team just as AI moved from the fringe to the mainstream. The result is The Infinity Machine. It's been a wild and fascinating ride.
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
Jun 11
Very insightful into what’s happening now in the AGI race.
I really like what you said about taking a step back to understand and that the book is a sort of therapy! 🧘
Can’t wait to do it on stage in Torino! With @vento_ventures
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Jun 11
Really enjoyed doing this one with @CalinFabri
Jun 11
🎙️ NEW EPISODE : @scmallaby is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller The Infinity Machine: @demishassabis, @GoogleDeepMind , and the Quest for Superintelligence.
He's the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A two-time Pulitzer finalist. The author of The Power Law and More Money Than God.
He negotiated unprecedented access to @GoogleDeepMind in November 2022 - a week before @ChatGPTapp launched. He spent 30 hours in a pub with Demis Hassabis. He interviewed @sama, @ilyasut, @mustafasuleyman, @geoffreyhinton .
In this episode we discuss:
⚔️ The moment @ChatGPTapp launched and Demis told him “they parked the tanks on my lawn”
📉 Why @OpenAI has a 50% chance of failing by the middle of next year
🇪🇺 Why @JeffBezos is opening an AI office in King's Cross and why the time to bet on Europe is now
💰 The $1 billion offer from @reidhoffman to spin DeepMind out of @Google
🚪 The @elonmusk, LA closet Skype call, that almost stopped the Google sale
🔥 Who we should actually trust with superintelligence
Episode OUT NOW.
Follow Venture Europe to get notified.
Link in first comment.
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Jun 11
Three common exaggerations:
The mega-IPOs will drive stocks down
Passive investors will have to own a piece of Musk
Loss making tech companies should stay away from public markets
Listen to the new episode of The Spillover.
open.spotify.com/episode/4tY…
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
ICYMI, I wrote about how the AI trading bots, and how we might one might need regulators who supervise datacenters, the way they do banks, based on some thoughts from chatting with @iaindunning and @scmallaby's book.
A DATACENTER IS A BANK
In today’s newsletter, I wrote some things I’ve been thinking about since our chat with @iaindunning, and how maybe one day we’ll have datacenter supervisors like we have bank supervisors who monitor things like depositor concentration etc
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
Jun 8
When talking to Europeans about whether they should seek “sovereignty” in cloud or AI or payments or any other technology, I’ve been arguing for deterrence, not duplication. Deterrence requires controlling chokepoints such that rivals will be wary of trying to coerce in the first place. I agree @paulg that it can be risky, but It’s ultimately a much less costly strategy than duplication, which requires investing in all manner of unproductive and potentially superfluous assets
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
The @AISecurityInst is hiring for a Director and for a Chief Research Officer. AISI is a remarkable organisation: doing globally important work, with a world-class team, in the heart of government.
These are some of the highest impact jobs in AI security anywhere. Do consider applying and sharing widely.
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
Jun 7
A nation’s people are its greatest natural resource.
If we want to succeed in a technology-infused world, we must ensure the next generation of innovators chooses to build here 🇬🇧🚀
thetimes.com/business/econom…
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Jun 7
Former UK PM Rishi Sunak has a smart take on AI sovereignty. For the US and China, building a fully independent AI stack is hard. For other countries, forget it. Rather than chase independence, the UK et al can aspire to indispensability by controlling key parts of the AI supply chain.
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Jun 7
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"I think the G7 more or less has to be less open to China until China's more open to the world," says CFR expert @Brad_Setser on why Chinese President Xi Jinping has no incentive to change China's export-driven growth model and what the G7 could do about it.
Watch the latest episode of The Spillover hosted by @scmallaby and Rebecca Patterson: youtu.be/nsHgtD6410s?si=LWgR…
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
Jun 5
Had fun moderating a NYC AI Governance & Safety talk last night with @scmallaby on AI policy and his book The Infinity Machine. He's an entertaining storyteller with sharp takes on the early deep learning vs RL fault lines, the AI governance "trilemma," and recursive improvement.
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
I’m one of those snobs who’s said things like “I only read old books”.
But I just read the entirety of the new @scmallaby book on this flight, and it really is excellent.
Really helpful for understanding the current AI environment and a great feet of accessible science writing.
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
"When current account surpluses are massive, as China's are, that money has to find someplace to go. And so China's buying stuff all over the place,” says expert @scmallaby, examining the purchase of brands like Blue Bottle, Everlane, and Volvo.
Watch the latest episode of The Spillover hosted by Sebastian Mallaby and Rebecca Patterson here: youtu.be/nsHgtD6410s?si=xFRJ…
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
May 31
For decades, artificial intelligence was dismissed as science fiction. Then one lab changed everything.
Inside a small London research company, scientists were teaching machines to play games, predict protein structures, and solve problems humans couldn’t. What started as an obscure AI experiment soon became the center of a global race for superintelligence — with enormous consequences for medicine, warfare, scientific discovery, and the future of human intelligence itself.
On this episode of Morning Wire, journalist @scmallaby explains how DeepMind helped launch the modern AI revolution and why its founder Demis Hassabis believes artificial intelligence could push beyond the limits of human understanding. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
Jun 3
A fun discussion, which got into all the challenges China has faced finding "diversified uses" for its growing FX stash
cfr.org/podcasts/spillover/c…
Jun 3
This week on The Spillover podcast, we are joined by @Brad_Setser, famous for tracking China’s global investment flows. It’s a good time to hear from Brad, and not just because trade and investment imbalances are the subject of the forthcoming G7 meeting. Measured as a share of global GDP, or just in absolute terms, China’s current account surplus has hit a record, and this is occurring at a time when the challenge of parking immense foreign currency receipts is arguably harder than ever before. China would rather not accumulate more dollar bonds: these can be frozen, as Russia discovered after invading Ukraine, and what’s more US inflation is eating into returns. Likewise, China would rather not channel more resources into its Belt and Road initiative: as a technique for accumulating friends and influence, this has been a bust. So why does China persist in accumulating foreign currency when it has no good place to put it?
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Jun 3
This week on The Spillover podcast, we are joined by @Brad_Setser, famous for tracking China’s global investment flows. It’s a good time to hear from Brad, and not just because trade and investment imbalances are the subject of the forthcoming G7 meeting. Measured as a share of global GDP, or just in absolute terms, China’s current account surplus has hit a record, and this is occurring at a time when the challenge of parking immense foreign currency receipts is arguably harder than ever before. China would rather not accumulate more dollar bonds: these can be frozen, as Russia discovered after invading Ukraine, and what’s more US inflation is eating into returns. Likewise, China would rather not channel more resources into its Belt and Road initiative: as a technique for accumulating friends and influence, this has been a bust. So why does China persist in accumulating foreign currency when it has no good place to put it?
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Sebastian Mallaby retweeted
Jun 2
. @scmallaby on Demis’s response to Google sitting on the transformer for years:
Jun 1
.@scmallaby spent 30 hours with Demis Hassabis in the back of a British pub. I sat down with Sebastian to chat about his recent book, The Infinity Machine, where he provides a fascinating history of DeepMind, Demis and the broader AI landscape. We hit on:
▪️ Whether the race between labs was inevitable
▪️ Project Mario: the secret plan to spin DeepMind out of Google
▪️ Why Google missed scaling the transformer despite inventing it and wasn’t first to ChatGPT and Claude Code
▪️ The personal history between Demis, Elon and Sam
▪️ The quasi-spiritual conviction Sebastian didn't expect to find underneath the science
0:00 Intro
2:04 Was the AI Race Inevitable?
4:03 The 2015 Safety Summit Backfire
11:27 Why Google Doesn't Make As Concentrated Bets
15:51 Project Mario: The Secret Spinout Plan
19:43 What Demis Actually Regrets
23:46 Venture Startups vs. Tech Behemoths
34:08 David Silver and the RL True Believers
38:21 Demis, Elon, and the Evil Genius Feud
42:39 Great Man Theory vs. Inevitability
45:00 What Demis Didn't Want Published
YouTube: youtu.be/WC_embCiwgU
Spotify: bit.ly/4wRqvLE
Apple: bit.ly/4dDnnvq
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Jun 1
A short clip explaining the spiritual side of Demis Hassabis's quest for superintelligence.
dropbox.com/scl/fo/5kak7u9n7…
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