Demis Hassabis and Sebastian Mallaby on The Quest for Artificial General Intelligence (Part One)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with CEO and co-founder of Google Deep Mind and Nobel laureate, Demis Hassabis, and journalist and author of The Infinity Machine, Sebastian Malaby. Hassabis and Malaby joined us at the Friends House in London to discuss the rise of artificial intelligence and the pursuit of AGI.

Drawing on Malaby's unprecedented access to DeepMind, the conversation explores Hassabis's journey from chess prodigy to AI pioneer and the ambitions driving one of the world's most advanced research labs. Together they examine what artificial general intelligence might unlock, what it might cost, and what this story reveals about humanity's enduring drive to build and to understand. Let's join our host Tom Mackenzie live at Friends House. Thank you very much indeed. Let's get to the introductions that that really matter.

So Demis Hasabis, obviously sitting to my left, is the CEO and co-founder of Google Deepmind and isomorphic labs in 2024. Demis was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AI research contributions for protein structure prediction via an AI model named Alpha Fold. Demis is a former child chess prodigy and is a five-time winner of the World Games Champion. He's a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2017 and 2025, he featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE.

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