Is anyone else reading Sebastian Mallaby’s new book about Demis and Deepmind: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence? It’s pretty good, and goes a lot into his background before Deepmind (chess kid, developing games at bullfrog, CS at Cambridge, bullfrog again, games startup…). He’s certainly an interesting guy, and as others are pointing out, more thoughtful and earnest than your average tech industry leader. One pleasant thing that comes across in the book is how he resisted the allure of moving to Silicon Valley and wanted to keep Deepmind in London, where he still lives.

I hadn’t really appreciated before the connection between his chess and game industry experience and the early reinforcement learning work that put Deepmind on the map, e.g. the Atari game AI demos, AlphaGo, Alphazero, etc. There is a fascinating thread there and it’s certainly a case of the right person with the right mix of past experience and vision being able to pick exactly the right problems to focus on to move technology forward.

The book has a few flaws: it’s maybe a little too uncritical of its subject. But that’s almost a given with books of this kind where the author gets a lot of access.

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moab 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Bro, are we reading the same book? The book is totally uncritical of the subject and paints him like the second coming of christ. It feels like GDM wanted a canonization of Hassabis, and the writer simply obliged. Also, how does everything that GDM did keep coming back to some vague ideas in the guy's thesis? He is a great leader, no doubt, but him winning the Nobel Prize was just a huge joke.

Out of all the heads of AI orgs out there, Dennis is the best, but the book did him a disservice by painting an unrealistically sunny picture of him as some kind of visionary figure.

	▲	libraryofbabel 26 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not a “bro” (there are women on this site you know), and perhaps you’re missing the British understatement in my “maybe a little too uncritical of its subject” line. Obviously the book is totally biased in favor of Hassabis and Deepmind. That doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting read and that doesn’t mean the connection between his experience in the games industry and Deepmind’s early success isn’t there. And I think the book does highlight his most critical skill, which is projecting a Reality Distortion Field to get other smart people to believe in things he has in mind that are still very speculative bets. Like I already said, bias is inevitable in a book where the writer gets access (to the point of interviewing Hassabis in a North London pub every month), but the benefit to readers is that you do get a lot more insight into what makes the guy tick than you would in a book written by an outsider. I certainly learned a lot and just because I did doesn’t mean I’m buying into some cult of tech hero worship.
	▲	AIorNot an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah hero worship and making into a villan is all part and parcel of the Nerd community these days Guys hes just one smart guy who got placed in a good moment in the AI technological revolution- hes def not the second coming of Christ