The Infinity Machine

Sebastian Mallaby's biography of DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis benefits from three years of sustained personal access, giving it a texture that after-the-fact retrospectives can't match — the early chapters, tracing Hassabis's path from chess prodigy and game designer to AI researcher, have real narrative momentum. The book's weaker spot is its critical distance: several reviewers have noted it drifts toward hagiography and doesn't push hard on the ethical contradictions of the AGI race it's chronicling, treating the pursuit of artificial general intelligence more as an inspiring quest than a subject demanding scrutiny. At roughly a hundred pages longer than it needs to be, it's most compelling as an origin story and least convincing as a reckoning with what that origin has set in motion.