Book Review: The Infinity Machine - by Mike Winer

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Book Review: The Infinity Machine<br>The past, present, and future of Google DeepMind

Mike Winer<br>Aug 10, 2026

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The Infinity Machine, by Sebastian Mallaby, has three protagonists.

There’s Demis Hassabis, a lover of games. He loves making games, he loves playing games, but most of all he likes winning games. Geoffrey Hinton called him the most competitive person he’d ever met1.<br>Next there’s Demis Hassabis, a scientist. This is a man who cares about understanding nature, and building tools that further that understanding.<br>There’s also Demis Hassabis, a visionary. A man with a mission to use his gifts for the betterment of all.<br>This is the story of how those three men built DeepMind and sparked the modern era of artificial intelligence.<br>Thanks for reading Millicosm! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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The Rise of Demis Hassabis

The first character we meet is Demis Hassabis, gamer. At age six, he discovered a talent for chess. Or, more precisely, chess discovered him. After watching him play, a renowned chess master told the Hassabis parents that six-year-old Demis was the best young player he’d ever seen. The family immediately reoriented itself around chess. His father always told him he’d be proud of Demis as long as he tried his hardest. To most of us, that sounds like a reassuring bit of parental support. To Demis, that meant that if you still had the energy to stand up at the end of the tournament, you were screwing around.<br>Demis climbed through the ranks of young chess players. The turning point came when he was twelve, at a tournament in Liechtenstein. After resigning a grueling game, Demis looked around the room. It was full of brilliant people, all spending their brainpower on the game of chess. A young Demis realized they were wasting their time. It was at that moment that he decided… to get really good at a wider variety of board games.<br>As his love of games matured, it stopped being enough to just play them. Teenaged Demis joined a game studio, working on the 90s-era artificial intelligence of non-player characters. After college, he founded his own games studio: Elixir. He recruited his classmate: a crack programmer named David Silver. And, together, they set out to make the most sophisticated video game in history: a political simulation game called Republic: The Revolution.<br>Their ambitions grew loftier and loftier. The game would have hundreds of NPCs, each with their own personality. Hype began to build. It was named the most anticipated game in the world. That proved prophetic: fans would spend years anticipating as the delays mounted. No amount of engineering genius could fit Demis’ vision onto the hardware of the time. David Silver spent sleepless nights trying to get enough of the game ready for demos. But even then the Elixir team was forced to cheat: running the game on souped-up machines with multiple processors (later, under Demis’ leadership, GDM would again be caught overpromising and fiddling with demos. The author of The Infinity Machine refuses to make that connection). When a pared down version of Republic came out, it was a disappointment. A burnt-out Silver quit.<br>Soon after, the company folded. In a strange twist of fate Demis and Silver found themselves on the same track once again: PhD programs, studying the young field of artificial intelligence.<br>The Rise of DeepMind

So far, this has been a biography of Gamer Demis. It’s unclear exactly when Science Demis entered the scene. Perhaps the seeds were planted in that chess hall in Liechtenstein. I think we may have met him during the college years. But he doesn’t become a protagonist until after the fall of Elixir Studios.<br>His experiences as a programmer had convinced Demis that the orderly rules he programmed into his NPCs couldn’t possibly be the route to powerful AI. So during grad school, Demis became a student of neuroscience. He studied the messy, flawed mechanisms that powered the human brain.<br>It was around this time that Demis first read Ender’s Game. The book is about a child prodigy who builds a team of strategic geniuses and saves the world. Doubtless, Gamer Demis found something to enjoy in that book. But it was even more meaningful to Demis the Visionary.

Demis told Mallaby that no biography would be complete unless he read Ender’s Game.<br>By the end of the PhD, Demis the Scientist and Demis the Visionary had landed upon a new ambition: building Artificial General Intelligence. It would be an infinity machine: infinite knowledge, infinite power, infinite money. Not only would this solve all of science, but it would solve all of medicine, end poverty, perhaps even put an end to all wars.<br>To do this, Demis would need a supporting team of people who weren’t named Demis Hassabis. David Silver was still feeling burned by Elixir, so Demis turned to a fellow scientist-visionary named Shane...