YouSaid · the spoken record

Sebastian Mallaby

lines on the record: 87
first: 2026-06-16
most recent: 2026-06-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Meeting with AI leaders both in academia and big companies like Huawei and Hike Fission and Antgroup. And the thing which was surprising was the extent to which people brought up the issue of AI safety. And I say that was surprising because my friends who had done AI policy in the Biden administration had primed me to expect that there would be no mention of safety in China, that they basically didn't care about it, that the muscle memory that we have in the West of technology being dangerous, the atom bomb experience, the Cuban missile crisis, our ambivalence about technology is not shared in China where their idea of catastrophe is sort of like the cultural revolution, some political thing that goes wrong.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back in March, before my book was published in the US, I went to China because the Chinese are faster at everything, including publishing books. And my publisher brought me out there and basically took me”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most stunning thing, I think, about alphabet from their most recent financial results is that two or three years ago we would have said, well, large language models are going to cannibalize search. Search is dead. Advertising based on search is Google's cash engine. They're in real trouble. Turns out that Google now gets more clicks on its search links than it used to, and it charges more for each one than it used to. because the value of the click is bigger with AI embedded in it. And so they've managed to turn that around and it's extraordinary.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, Google is the champion of providing easy to use software to individuals or small businesses, the whole G-suite, and the integrating Gemini into all of that stuff very well. And so why wouldn't they win?”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've got automatic payment systems that have set up, and it's a pain in the neck to switch. So I think they do become sticky these systems over time. And then you can charge more money for them.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just not transferable to large complex organizations with huge databases and all kinds of customer confidentiality concerns and all that stuff. So I am less down on SaaS than the market is as a result. Now, I guess there was also another thread in here, which is whether the foundation models become commoditized. There I agree with you that over time they become sticky. Because if we think into the future, partly the systems will have conversed with the user and know the user very deeply. And as you say, you don't want to switch out your friend, but also the system will have your credit card. It will know all the online sites you like to shop from. And it will be much harder than switching out your bank account, right?”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And helps them to integrate AI and use it on their own internal data and so forth. And those IT challenges are notoriously difficult for big organizations. So I just think that the model of one smart individual who codes up MailChimp, Vibe codes it in a weekend, and it's good enough for him.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of what you were saying there is sort of the question of is the SAS apocalypse overdone? Is enterprise software going to be utterly displaced by foundation models that allow you to code out whatever enterprise software you want? And you don't need an intermediary software company to do it for you. And I agree with your private equity friend that there are lots of reasons why that ain't going to happen. Companies are going to be comfortable with their trusted enterprise software provider in many cases. And they're going to trust that enterprise software provider to plug the generative AI models into the enterprise software. In some ways, you are delegating the choice of which model is better and how to integrate it to your SaaS provider. And if you want to reason to believe that that's the way forward, I've got one word for you, which is Palantir. I mean, that is Palantir's business. It holds the hands of big corporations.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly, straight up and to the right, and the cost curve is coming down, down, down, and I'm going, I'm not sure about that. The tokens seem to be getting more expensive. Anyway, if you give me a specific from... Benedict. I mean, now you have a lot of respect for him. I'll tell you if I agree on it.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I suspect we would agree actually on quite a lot of things. I remember I was on a panel with him a couple of months ago at the Milken Conference, and we certainly agreed there, possibly because sitting between us, there was Kathy Wood of Arc. So we were united in disagreeing with her.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of its parent company behind it, a massive kind of consumer surface, which allows it to roll out the models to literally 2.5 billion people or something through AI mode in search, AI overviews, AI mode. They can put it into Gmail, they can put it into everything. I think in terms of retail deployment and financial muscle, it's quite tough to go up against Google. So that's one kind of bear case. And the other would be that sort of businesses who are the consumers of all these tokens decide in a couple of years time the tokens are too expensive, we're not actually getting as much productivity as we hoped. These things called humans are quite productive after all. And we're just going to spend less on AI. Than everybody expected. I think that's the best case.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was unconventional. We're not maximizing here for winning some business race. We're maximizing for building safe frontier AI. And that culture, which doesn't sound like it's set up to do the best, has turned out to do the best. And at the same time, the culture creates this stickiness and loyalty within the staff. They tend not to leave, they tend not to churn. It's not like the other labs where people are always being poached for a bigger paycheck. And so the bull case is these guys are in the lead. Once you're in the lead, you can use the model to code the next model, so recursive self-improvement, favors the leader, and they have a very tight culture, and they just seem to be on fire. And this is something which is going to grow and grow. What's the bare case? I'd say the bear case would be, first of all, that Google DeepMind has the deep pockets.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the bull case is that they smartly, or maybe by luck, focused on enterprise facing AI, and they didn't waste their time with video generation and stuff that was going to lose money. And so they produced the best coding assistant, the best agentic system, the best cybersecurity system. And they basically knocked it out of the park three times in a row on stuff that businesses want to pay for. And they have a particular culture, which is not just built around, hey, you know, we're going to win this race and make the most money. It's kind of built around a culture of safety and trying to be responsible. I mean, three years ago, Anthropic was a sort of cookie lab, which was doing science experiments don't mean to be too denegrating with cookie, but you know what I mean?”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Examples of moral dilemmas with explanations of how the deceased parent would like the child to behave. And so this is a very subtle approach to aligning the models. And so I think anthropic is kind of in a class of its own in how imaginatives in thinking about how we control frontier intelligence.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Imaginative technique, which is that instead of giving AI systems a constitution with do's and don'ts, which was the post-training safety approach of two years ago, where you might say, do not lie, do not help somebody to build a biological weapon. Do not help somebody to build a chemical weapon. You would give them a bunch of rules. Now, because it's understood that the AI might have one personality, which is to break rules on purpose, because you want to be badass, you have to instead try to bring up the model like a parent might bring up a teenager. And so anthropic has the idea that we write a letter as if it were from a deceased parent to be opened by the child on his or her 18th birthday to kind of give you models of how to behave as a responsible person in the world. There are kind of richly reasoned”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that when they are pre trained on all of the text on the internet, they read all the novels, all human writing about all facets of human experience, and they develop multiple personalities. They understand how to be lazy. They understand how to be aggressive. They understand how to be duplicitous. They understand how to be Napoleonic in the lust for power. And they read all these books about these different behaviors, and therefore they can think their way into all of those personalities. And so now you have something a bit like an unruly teenager, which is still being formed. And you don't know what direction it's going to move into and whether it will start doing drugs and not showing up for class or what. It's not like there's one terminator programmed into it. It's more that there's a bunch of behaviors that could in some unpredictable way go wrong. And so anthropic is responding to this with this very”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You also ask about anthropic, and I think anthropic is super interesting. Just in the way that they think about PDOOM and how they think about alignment of the models is really, really interesting. So it used to be that when people thought this terminator risk, they would tell this story about the paperclip maximizer thought experiment, right? Okay, so you tell the model to do something innocuous, for example, make a lot of paper clips, and then it realizes that humans tend to use up metal. And so the humans are kind of in the way of achieving the objective, so you wipe out the humans. That's the crude thought experiment from Nick Bostrom from whatever, 15 years ago. What anthropic is saying as it builds these very frontier models and kind of observes them in the lab and how they behave, is that that is way too simple. The real danger from these systems”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, of course, the question is there could be control which just limits who gets it and is designed to make it safer but doesn't sort of interrupt the money making potential of the models. In some ways, if the government restricts the supply, the price might go up. Or it could be much more heavy-handed intervention, which would screw up the economics of these companies. I suspect the government is not going to screw up the economics of these companies because they've got no interest in messing up American business in any way they view AI as strategic and the competition against China. So I think probably investors would be all right, but it's certainly a factor.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The decision making authority over who gets it when. So there we have the experiment, we've run it, right? You know, the government that was the most laissez-faire became quite controlling. And I think it only gets more controlling from here on out because the models are going to be more powerful and demand more control.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I 100% agree with you that investors should be thinking about the prospect of government intervention in AI. I mean, the Trump administration came into office in 25 super laissez-faire, and they basically undid some of what the Biden guys had done in terms of trying to set up the basis for regulating AI. But they've done a 180. Since Anthropic came out with this model called Mythos about a month ago, which can essentially cyber attack almost anything and penetrate it, whether it's an operating system or your web browser or your bank account, all of that was suddenly vulnerable if mythos had been widely released on a general basis when the Trump administration realized the power of mythos, they all of a sudden said, wait, okay, we need to control this. And they essentially requisitioned from anthropic”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that's correct. You know, 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, 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. I mean, when Jan Le Kun, the former chief scientist of Meta, says zero. I think that's crazy. If you just say nothing to see here, you've got no right to be in the debate. I don't think it's a high probability of doom, but it's not zero.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Visit Jeff Hinton, the academic father of Deep Learning, who lives in Toronto. And I sit in his kitchen and I debate him on this because he's a Duma. I say, look, Jeff, why are you so depressed? And he says, okay, here's a thought experiment. You have an AI. It's very powerful, but you're worried that there's a Russian AI. Going to come and attack your AI. Now, you, as a human, you're too slow and dumb to know when that attack is coming. So you're going to empower your own AI to watch out for the attack. And when the attack is coming, defend yourself or maybe counterattack whatever you do. Make sure you survive. Ooh, survive. There you have it. Now you're feeling comfortable, Sebastian? You've just given the machine a survival instinct.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three months. And so I think the super abundance thing, it may be true, but the path to get there, we have to talk about that as well. That's my sense on that side of the debate. I think on the doom side of the debate, I'll give you my own personal journey on this. I began by thinking, of course AI is going to be smarter than us. It already beats us at chess since the 1990s at Go since 2016. Now it can't the bar exam. It can do PhD level math, all that stuff. Of course it's smarter, but it doesn't have an incentive to attack us. We are evolved as human beings to pass on our DNA. Therefore, we have to survive to do that. Machines don't have DNA. They don't want to pass it on, and they don't want to survive. They have no reason to attack us. So I wander around for the first year or two of this project, feeling kind of comfortable and happy. And then one day I go...”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bit of a myth because people adjust, they get displaced from one thing, but they move to a new thing. With the China shock, they didn't. But if you look at the size of the China shock, in a 12-year period between 1999 and 2011, the total number of jobs displaced was 2 million, which is actually a small number and a huge labor market like the US, where there's a lot of months and months anyway. And yet the political reaction against trade, against globalization, in terms of the swing towards protectionism, frankly, in both political parties, was enormous. So it shows you that a small to medium shock to the labor market creates an enormous political consequence. And so A4TORI with artificial intelligence, you're going to have a bigger shock, you're going to have a bigger political reaction. We're already seeing that in the polling around AI in the last two”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, look, 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. I think the super abundant story may turn out to be true on a kind of longer view, let's say 20, 30, 40 years. The problem is that in the path to get there, there's going to be a tremendous amount of disruption. And that's going to be politically quite difficult to navigate. I think a useful lens through which to view this question is the China shock in trade. So in 2003, or thereabouts, you get this enormous surge of Chinese exports into the US and people lose their jobs in a very concentrated way. Certain industries just get wiped out. And for the first time in the history of economic study of the effects of trade, you actually see negative effects on workers. Before that, it was kind of...”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yes, all through this topic, there is this religious expression because, you know, religion is the lexicon for dealing with something that we find too mysterious to really understand.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I have to understand it. And if I can understand it, it's like understanding nature better and therefore understanding the intelligence that might have created nature and I will be closer to what I would call God. And so for him, it's a kind of quasi-spiritual quest to build the artificial intelligence. For Ilya, it's a way of expressing the power of the artificial intelligence. There's the story of Lewandowski, I forget his first name now, but the early, early engineer at what became Waymo later started a kind of church in worship of AI because AI is so omniscient and it's kind of like a god. Mark Andreessen lampoons those who believe in sort of some ethereal second coming, a kind of rapture where AI will have a singularity, the AI will go vertical in its rate of improvement. The whole world will change”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's just one example of this religion. I'll give you another one. So Demis one day was sitting with me in a park in North London. We would meet for two hours at a time and we would get deep into stuff. There was another picnic table next to us where two people having a normal quotidian conversation about some friend of theirs who'd gone to hospital. And was she better? Was she okay, et cetera, et cetera? I was seated opposite Demis who had gone into this riff about how he reads scientific papers after his kids go to sleep in the evening from 10 p.m. until 4 a.m. And as he's reading these papers, he says to me, reality is staring at me, screaming at me, calling at me to understand it.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That people reach for religious terminology when they're around AI. They just do it naturally. So, you know, there's this story about Ilya Satskeva, who was the chief scientist at Open AI. I talked to him a lot for this project. And there was a point when he was at a retreat with his fellow scientists. And they were gathered in the evening around a fire pit. And he was talking about safety and he said, okay, I want to explain to you. We might have an AI that's dangerous. It wouldn't be aligned with us. So here's what we're going to do with it. And he produced an effigy, which was supposed to represent a malign AI, and he put it into the firepit and he burnt it like a medieval cleric, putting a witch to death.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can't control. It's going to be human level, it might challenge us. And as he says this, he has this sort of excited smile on his face. And you think, well, that's a bit strange. He's talking about potential doom and he's smiling. And then somebody in the audience says, wait, wait, wait, you've just told us, Shane, that this could be threatening to humanity. And you haven't provided any antidote, and surely you're going to tell us how we're going to stop it. At which point Shane turns around and says, how do we stop it? And he's kind of giggling. And you think, why are you laughing at this dangerous thing? And you realize that for humans to contemplate annihilation is absurd. And the absurd is a close cousin of humor. And the reason I tell this story is that it's a springboard to the religion point, which is that this is such a hard thing to think about.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we're dealing with with AGI powerful intelligence that rivals human cognition is something that's so powerful that it's both exciting and scary and just hard to get your mind around. And so if you look, for example, at the 2009 speech that caused the foundation of DeepMind, this was Shane Legg, Demis's co-founder, who gave a talk in 2009 about how superintelligence would arrive in 2030. So unbelievably spot on prediction. And towards the end of that lecture, which is captured on a grainy video online, you see him pivot from explaining how algorithms are getting stronger, there's more data online, computers getting more powerful. And so we're heading towards this intelligence explosion. And then he says, and it's going to be threatened. It's going to do things.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's one basic thing going on here, and I'm going to take a slight detour, but it answers your question.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least, then doing the work of going deep is something that takes time, it takes effort. I know I can do that. I've done it multiple times. That's not difficult. What's difficult is, has somebody done the book before? Has somebody else got some rival project which is going to derail me? You've made the point on your own podcast, Tim. Don't put a lot of effort into something where there just isn't much leverage there. You know, you could do the best book in the world, an A plus book on a C minus topic. It would get you nowhere. So the hard thing is to make sure it's an A plus topic and an A plus personality and then the deep dive is something, you know, I just make sure I speak to enough experts who are insiders. I take the time. These books take me four years or so each time. So I give myself the oxygen to get deep, deep in with the insiders. And that's how I produce the.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, to me, the challenge of understanding and complex topic is the easy bit because if you know you've got the right personality who can carry the story and it's a subject that people either will care about for sure or should care about,”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does it go, and I went to Pitch Demis in early November 2022. And then I persuaded him to give me a lot of access end of November. ChatGPT comes out. And way earlier than I expected, my fringe subject went to the mainstream proving, Tim, that it's better to be lucky than smart.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which defeated the world champion at Go, and then Alpha Fold, which was the protein folding system. And both of these things had the quality that you had this almost infinite search space where the different permutations of the game of Go are almost infinite because they're so big. The different permutations of how you can fold an amino acid chain into a protein shape are even bigger, 130 zeros added onto the end of the number of permutations in Go. So you have these AI systems that could understand infinity. So this idea of an infinity machine began to percolate and I figured it's interesting to me, probably at some point it will go mainstream, but even if it doesn't go mainstream, I love it and I love Demis. And the two things together, I always look for the subject and the personality. I had both and I thought, okay, this”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Power law, the book about venture capital, had come out in February of 2022. And while I was researching that, I'd been to lots of tech conferences, of course, including some in Europe. And this twinkly-eyed guy would show up, Demisisabis, and he would look totally approachable and kind of guy next door and unintimidating. And then he would get on the stage and out of his mouth would come this spiel about computer science, neuroscience, chemistry, biology, physics, philosophy, the history of movies, you name it. And that mixture of the approachability and the massive intellect always struck me as beguiling. And I thought, hmm, this would be a great character to write about. And then at the same time, you know, I was aware of Alpha Go, the 2016 model that Demesis' team at DeepMind had been.”
2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT