New book profiles DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and AGI goal

In short: A new biography by Sebastian Mallaby will chronicle Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the push to build artificial general intelligence.

What happened

Sebastian Mallaby has written a new book, "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence." It is a biography of Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind, now part of Google.

The book is scheduled to be published on March 31, 2026 in the US, with a UK edition on June 9, 2026. It is listed as a hardcover of about 480 pages (some listings say 432 pages) from Penguin Press, with ISBN 9780593831847.

Mallaby reports that he had unusually broad access for a book like this. He conducted over 30 hours of interviews with Hassabis and hundreds of hours with DeepMind insiders, including co-founder Shane Legg. The book also includes perspectives from critics and rivals, such as estranged co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, OpenAI researcher Ilya Sutskever, and AI scientist Geoffrey Hinton.

The story follows Hassabis from being a child chess prodigy in North London to studying neuroscience and co-founding DeepMind in 2010. It also covers DeepMind’s work on AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts protein shapes (like guessing how a long string will fold into a 3D knot), which is linked in the report to Hassabis’s 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Hassabis and Mallaby are scheduled to discuss the book at an Intelligence Squared event on April 14, 2026, focusing on the benefits and risks of AGI (artificial general intelligence, meaning an AI that can learn and reason across many different tasks).

Why it matters

Big AI labs already shape the tools people use at work, in school, and at home. A detailed, sourced account of how one of the most influential labs thinks about building more powerful AI can help the public understand what is being pursued, and what trade-offs might come with it.

Source: Financial Times