Demis Hassabis Wants to Build AGI. Should We Trust Him?

I'm Caleb Bissinger, and I'm Rufus Grisscombe. And this is the next big idea. Today, Demasisavis wants to build superintelligence. Should we trust him? For three years,

Two men met regularly at a pub in a leafy neighborhood in North London. They'd climb the rickety wooden stairs to the second floor, and there, in a room that was always empty, they'd sink into leather chairs beneath a tarna chandelier and talk for hours. One of the men was journalist Sebastian Malaby. The other was a local boy, chess prodigy who'd grown up to be a video game designer, a neuroscientist, a noble laureate in chemistry, and one of the most important and powerful figures in the world of artificial intelligence. His name is Demas Hisabas.

Those conversations, along with interviews with more than a hundred people in Demis's orbit, are the grist of Sebastian's new book, The Infinity Machine. It does all the standard biography stuff, charting Demis's improbable journey to become the guy in charge of Google's AI. But what really got me interested in Sebastian's book is something he writes in the introduction. New kind of intelligence, he says, is being wheeled into the world by a remarkably small number of people. Each of them is driven by a particular mix of curiosity and hubris, vanity and avarice, idealism and craving, and the sobering reality is that for

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