Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis – Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Early Breakthroughs (#870)

Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) Paul A. Volcker is a senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of six books, including More Money Than God, Power Law, The Man Who Knows, again The World Bank.

His latest book says The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.

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Transcript

Show Notes

• Connect with Sebastian Mallaby:

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Books

Recommended Reading, Viewing, and Listening

Perfect Tim Ferriss Show Episodes

Movies

People

Companies and Organizations

Institutions

AI Systems & Tools

Concepts

Time stamps

• [00:00:00] Start.
• [00:02:11] A twinkly-eyed polymath who became Sebastian’s next book.
• [00:06:55] Choosing your next book project is the way a good VC chooses a startup.
• [00:09:41] Why does God keep hitting the superintelligence team.
• [00:11:13] Shane Legg’s 2009 prophecy – and nervous giggles.
• [00:13:11] Ilya Sutskever burns the effigy.
• [00:13:54] Demis at 4 am, hunting God’s algorithm.
• [00:18:43] A large quantity, Max is crazyand China’s shock lesson.
• [00:22:39] A kitchen debate with Geoff Hinton that changed Sebastian.
• [00:24:06] Why the possibilities of destruction are not protected.
• [00:24:52] Will Washington take over the labs? The wake-up call myth.
• [00:27:18] Anthropic bull case, bear case, and dead parent letter.
• [00:33:24] Where Sebastian and Benedict Evans broke up.
• [00:38:16] Is the SaaS apocalypse over? One word: Palantir.
• [00:39:53] The AI ​​friend will never change.
• [00:41:56] Is Google winning consumer AI by default?
• [00:44:45] Four cities, eight days: China is actually talking about security.
• [00:47:28] A non-Cold War AI playbook.
• [00:49:45] Did the chip shipment controls really work?
• [00:51:49] Burnt doves: why Washington vows China won’t talk.
• [00:54:56] “By 2028, the race is over” — the bet of one lab manager.
• [00:59:11] Inside Hikvision: toddlers, sensors, and US sanctions.
• [01:01:07] Bill Gurley’s Uber bet: the venture capital is perfect.
• [01:05:18] Luke Nosek embraced DeepMind into existence.
• [01:10:52] Thiel heresy: never invest by committee.
• [01:11:59] How the Founders Fund almost botched the deal of the century.
• [01:14:30] Selling Google for $650M: a secret British heist?
• [01:16:41] The Traitorous Eight, farming leave, and a list of things to do in the UK.
• [01:20:55] Ender’s Game: “That’s exactly how I see myself.”
• [01:23:42] It’s so dumb Gödel, Escher, Bach? Maybe an LLM would help.
• [01:25:19] If not Demis or Sam, then Dario.
• [01:26:04] My royalties are going down – and what’s going down in late 2022.
• [01:27:47] Lila Sciences and self-service labs.
• [01:31:13] Sebastian’s billboard: “Make up your mind.”
• [01:35:14] One thing Sebastian will never give to an AI.
• [01:40:09] Separate thoughts.

Sebastian Mallaby Quotes In Conversation

“These machines will be smarter than us. They will want to survive and they can deceive, they can hide you, they can walk behind you, pretend to do one thing and then do another. All this has been shown in all the model tests. And so we combine those things, I think your chances of perishing will not be zero.”

– Sebastian Mallaby

“For humans, thinking about extinction is absurd and absurd is a close cousin of comedy.”

– Sebastian Mallaby

“Throughout this article there is this talk of religion because religion is a dictionary to talk about something that we find very incomprehensible to understand.

– Sebastian Mallaby

“I think any sane person should be excited and a little bit scared, and that’s kind of it. It sounds contradictory, but really, it’s the only sane answer.”

– Sebastian Mallaby

“We only need to be ahead in the next few years, because in 2028 we will get to iterative self-improvement, where the frontier model is the code, alone, the next frontier model, and progress just goes straight up, and at that point with iterative self-improvement, we’re done. The race is over. Whoever comes first at that time.”

– Sebastian Mallaby

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