Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of six books, including More Money Than God, The Power Law, The Man Who Knew, and The World’s Banker.
His latest book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by:
Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early
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Transcripts
Show Notes
- Connect with Sebastian Mallaby:
Books
Recommended Reading, Watching, & Listening
Relevant Tim Ferriss Show Episodes
Films
People
Companies & Organizations
Institutions
AI Systems & Tools
Concepts
Timestamps
- [00:00:00] Start.
- [00:02:11] The twinkly eyed polymath who became Sebastian’s next book.
- [00:06:55] Picking the next book project the way a great VC picks a startup.
- [00:09:41] Why God keeps crashing the superintelligence party.
- [00:11:13] Shane Legg’s grainy 2009 prophecy — and the nervous giggle.
- [00:13:11] Ilya Sutskever burns an effigy.
- [00:13:54] Demis at 4 a.m., hunting God’s algorithm.
- [00:18:43] Super-abundance, Mad Max, and the China shock lesson.
- [00:22:39] The kitchen debate with Geoff Hinton that flipped Sebastian.
- [00:24:06] Why a zero-percent chance of doom is indefensible.
- [00:24:52] Will Washington seize the labs? The Mythos wake-up call.
- [00:27:18] Anthropic’s bull case, bear case, and a dead parent’s letter.
- [00:33:24] Where Sebastian and Benedict Evans part ways.
- [00:38:16] Is the SaaS apocalypse overdone? One word: Palantir.
- [00:39:53] The AI friend you’ll never switch.
- [00:41:56] Does Google win consumer AI by default?
- [00:44:45] Four cities, eight days: China actually talks safety.
- [00:47:28] A Cold War non-proliferation playbook for AI.
- [00:49:45] Did the chip export controls actually work?
- [00:51:49] Burned doves: why Washington swears China won’t talk.
- [00:54:56] “By 2028, the race is over” — one lab boss’ bet.
- [00:59:11] Inside Hikvision: toddlers, sensors, and US sanctions.
- [01:01:07] Bill Gurley’s Uber bet: venture capital perfected.
- [01:05:18] Luke Nosek bear-hugs DeepMind into existence.
- [01:10:52] Thiel’s heresy: never invest by committee.
- [01:11:59] How Founders Fund nearly fumbled the deal of the century.
- [01:14:30] Selling to Google for $650M: a secret British heist?
- [01:16:41] The Traitorous Eight, gardening leave, and the UK’s to-do list.
- [01:20:55] Ender’s Game: “That’s really how I see myself.”
- [01:23:42] Too dumb for Gödel, Escher, Bach? Maybe an LLM can help.
- [01:25:19] If not Demis or Sam, then Dario.
- [01:26:04] My royalties cliff — and what dropped in late 2022.
- [01:27:47] Lila Sciences and the labs that run themselves.
- [01:31:13] Sebastian’s billboard: “Prepare your mind.”
- [01:35:14] The one thing Sebastian will never outsource to AI.
- [01:40:09] Parting thoughts.
Sebastian Mallaby Quotes from the Interview
“These machines will be smarter than us. They will want to survive and they can be deceptive, they can obfuscate, they can go behind your back, pretend they’re doing one thing and then actually do another. All of this has been shown in all the tests of the models. And so we put those things together, I think your probability of doom cannot be zero.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“For humans, to contemplate annihilation is absurd and the absurd is a close cousin of humor.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“All through this topic there is this religious expression because religion is the lexicon for dealing with something that we find too mysterious to really understand.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“I think any reasonable person should be both excited and a bit frightened, and that’s just the nature of it. It sounds contradictory, but actually, that’s the only rational response.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“We only need to be ahead for the next couple of years, because by 2028 we will get to recursive self-improvement, where the frontier model codes, by itself, the next frontier model, and progress just goes vertical, and at that point with recursive self-improvement, we’re done. The race is over. Whoever comes first at that point, that’s it.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
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