“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity Machine

This week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leaders are quite as many faced as slippery Sam. Take, for example, Demis Hassabis, the North London based co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind. In his new biography, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, the British journalist Sebastian Mallaby argues that Hassabis is, in contrast, one faced. And that face is not only decent, but informed by the enlightened ethics of Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.
Mallaby presents Hassabis as the anti-Altman. He’s stayed at DeepMind for sixteen years, lived in the same London house, drives a decade-old car. Rather than power, Google’s AI supremo seeks scientific enlightenment. Like Spinoza, his God is the master watchmaker of the universe. And so doing science, Hassabis explained to Mallaby in one of their many conversations in the backroom of a North London pub, is like reading the mind of God. Decent Demis. Honest Hassabis. Let’s just hope this modest and thoughtful tech leviathan can bring Kantian ethics to Silicon Valley’s sprint for artificial general intelligence.

Five Takeaways
• Hassabis Is the Anti-Altman. Sixteen years at DeepMind. Same house in Highgate. Decade-old car. He doesn’t want power. He wants scientific enlightenment.
• Reading the Mind of God. Hassabis is a Spinozan. The god of Einstein. Science as spiritual quest. Kant and Spinoza in the Highgate pub.
• The Szilard Pedestrian Crossing. DeepMind’s first office on Russell Square. Turing three doors down. Szilard’s zebra crossing. The modern Manhattan Project.
• Two Categories of Failure. The idiot in charge — swap them out, problem solved. The structural kind — a good person defeated by larger forces. Hassabis is category two.
• The Go Players Who Quit. Some retired. Others kept playing with the machine as tutor. Two responses to superintelligence. Only one is worth having.

About the Guest
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Infinity Machine.

References
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby

About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: the many faces of Sam Altman
00:02:00 Altman’s duplicity versus Hassabis’s consistency
00:02:56 The moral wrestling: is this the Manhattan Project?
00:04:45 The ordinary genius in Highgate
00:06:29 The Szilard pedestrian crossing and a storyteller off the charts
00:09:10 Responding to The Guardian: why Hassabis isn’t Altman
00:12:58 The two categories of things that go wrong
00:14:48 Mustafa Suleiman’s remarkable backstory
00:17:01 Did Demis fire Mustafa?
00:19:46 Class, Eton, and the North London grammar school
00:22:27 Spinoza, Kant, and the god of science
00:25:27 Doing science is like reading the mind of God
00:29:57 Why not Princeton? The money problem
00:34:12 The secret DeepMind vs Google negotiation
00:43:11 Is Hassabis the next CEO of Google?
00:48:05 The Go players who quit