8 Apr 2026TBPN Acquired, New Yorker Vs. Sam Altman, Author of The Infinity Machine, Citrini Field Trip
Sebastian Mallaby on Demis Hassabis & 'The Infinity Machine'
Author Sebastian Mallaby discusses his book on Demis Hassabis, calling him a good guy with strong values after 30+ hours of interviews and conversations with 100 people around him. He covers Hassabis's Gödel, Escher, Bach-inspired conviction that brains are computers, DeepMind's safety-and-ethics board condition on the Google sale, Musk attending the first oversight meeting then launching OpenAI as a rival, race dynamics that make lab-level safety impossible (citing Anthropic vs. the Pentagon), safety conversations in China, and Larry Page's "speciesist" remark that fueled the Musk falling-out. The segment continues in part 2.
Sebastian Mallaby: DeepMind's Secret Hedge Fund & the Google Marriage
The interview with Demis Hassabis biographer Sebastian Mallaby continues. He explains how DeepMind secretly built a trading operation (which Hassabis never told him about directly; he learned via contacts from his Renaissance Technologies book), then walks through the failed safety-and-ethics commission with Elon Musk, Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman's three-year "Project Mario" fight to force an independent safety board on Google — including a $1 billion Reed Hoffman spin-out offer — and the post-ChatGPT merger of Google Brain into DeepMind that made the Pichai–Hassabis duo "the most important buddy act in global business." It closes with why 2 AM is Hassabis's favorite hour for science and quasi-spiritual thinking, before the hosts thank Mallaby and plug The Infinity Machine.