Sebastian Mallaby

Sebastian Mallaby is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the most respected chroniclers of the people and forces shaping the modern economy. He is the author of More Money Than God, a landmark history of the hedge fund industry, and The Man Who Knew, a Pulitzer Prize finalist biography of Alan Greenspan. His new book, The Infinity Machine, centers on Demis Hassabis, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, world-class game designer, and co-founder of DeepMind, as the defining figure of the artificial intelligence era. Mallaby spent years in conversation with Hassabis and dozens of others across the AI landscape to trace how a Cambridge computer science student who was reading Gödel as a teenager, programming games in his dorm room, and skeptical of symbolic logic before most people had heard the word "neural network" ended up leading the lab that beat the world champion at Go, won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, and merged with Google Brain to pull ahead of OpenAI in the frontier model race — all while remaining, at root, a scientist who just can't stand not knowing.