Excellent... beautifully written, with a clear understanding and engagement with the deepest ethical issues of our time.

A revealing portrait of the visionary behind Google DeepMind, the race for control of the future – and what it means to win.

Even in a technological world full of visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. Born to immigrant parents in North London, he proved to be a brilliant chess player at the age of five and belongs to the gifted programmers of his teenage years. He declined an offer of a seven-figure salary from a video game studio to study science at Cambridge. Long before today’s obsession with artificial intelligence, he founded the pioneering company DeepMind with a single, bold goal: the dream of artificial superintelligence that will solve humanity’s hardest problems, change life and work as we know it, and perhaps even unlock the deepest mysteries of the Universe.

For his scientific achievements, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024, and his company, now Google DeepMind, is considered the engine of the tech giant. Over the past three years, Sebastian Mallaby had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his close circle, as well as critics and opponents from other companies.

The result is a revealing portrait of a unique mind and a historic recognition of the revolution in artificial intelligence, a change arguably more significant than any since the dawn of complex thought 70,000 years ago. As Mallaby describes, DeepMind is locked in an arms race with Silicon Valley competitors to develop artificial general intelligence, thus taking control of humanity’s future. However, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis remained in Britain and, unlike his rivals, his goals are not wealth and power but scientific enlightenment.

Like them, however, he is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb. He aims to control the technology, but ultimately, the technology might control him – and humanity as a whole.