Demis Hassabis and the Race to Build AI with Sebastian Mallaby

In this episode

Demis Hassabis founded DeepMind in 2010, before machines could reliably tell a cat from a dog. He believed that artificial general intelligence was achievable, and that it should be built safely and deliberately. Along the way, Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, the system that cracked the fifty-year problem of predicting protein structures. Fifteen years on, the LLM race has erupted across rival labs and countries, and AI has become one of the most consequential and contested technologies of the era. Sebastian Mallaby is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a longtime chronicler of the collision between innovation and capital, from hedge funds to central bank…