A newly published book about Sir Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning AI pioneer of Cypriot descent, explores his life and work, while also underlining his determination to help humanity take the final steps towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI,) the theoritical advanced form of AI.
The biography's author, Sebastian Mallaby, wrote the book based on 30 hours of conversation with Hassabis, who, among other things is the co-founder of DeepMind, as well as over 100 interviews with people in Hassabis' circle.
Among other things, Mallaby writes about how Hassabis, the London-born son of a Greek Cypriot father and Chinese Singaporean mother, was a child chess prodigy and teenage video games creator. The biography follows Hassabis' professional journey ahead of becoming a successful entrepreneur who sold his AI lab to Google in 2014, including his studies of computer science at Cambridge University and neuroscience at the University College of London, followed by further research at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now 49-years-old, Hassabis, as the co-founder and chief executive of DeepMind, has the entire Google AI research team under his direction, Mallaby notes, and has stated that he would like to create a CERN-like research body to enable humanity to take its final steps towards AI.
As well as his professional goals, the book also examines how Hassabis comes accross as a person, with Mallaby writing that Hassabis "is decent and public-spirited and wants the best for humanity." He also quotes the tech pioneer as saying, "AGI is infinetly bigger than a company or a person or a set of owners. It is bigger than capitalism and national economies."
A review of the book in the Financial Times, meanwhile, says the book, "Is not just a biography. It is also a neat corporate history of DeepMind and a handy primer on the evolution of AI research over the past 25 years," while also noting that, "Whether, and how, Hassabis ever achieves AGI will form the defining chapters of Hassabis' extraoridinary, and unfinished, biography."
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence is published by Penguin Press.
