Space House kicked off its AI. After Intelligence series with about as big a name as the subject allows: Sebastian Mallaby, biographer of DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis.

Sebastian was talking about Demis, DeepMind, AI and more broadly about society's relationship with AI. He was talking with Dr Jon Cardoso-Silva of LSE's Data Science Institute about Sebastian's new book, The Infinity Machine.

Sebastian spent three years with unprecedented access to Demis. He traces Demis’ story from childhood chess prodigy to the man behind AlphaGo's stunning 2016 victory over the world's Go masters and AlphaFold2, which won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for cracking protein folding. Mallaby's Demis Hassabis is part obsessive, part mystic, the kind of person who talks about scientific discovery as reading "the mind of God." One defeated Go grandmaster put it more bluntly: the machine had beaten him through means he simply couldn't understand.

Arguably the most thought-provoking nugget came during the audience Q&A. Sebastian talked about the intense competition and ambition of Demis. He posited that while Demis is "one of the good guys", he put the audience in Demis’ shoes and asked how we would cope trying to apply the brakes in this race. "He might be good, but what he's building might not do good," he suggested.