Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of six books, including More Money Than God, The Power Law, The Man Who Knew, and The World’s Banker.
His latest book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by:
Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early
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“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 and 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.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“For humans, to contemplate annihilation is absurd and the absurd is a close cousin of humor.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“All through this topic there is this religious expression because religion is the lexicon for dealing with something that we find too mysterious to really understand.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“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.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“We only need to be ahead for the next couple of years, because by 2028 we will get to recursive self-improvement, where the frontier model codes, by itself, the next frontier model, and progress just goes vertical, and at that point with recursive self-improvement, we’re done. The race is over. Whoever comes first at that point, that’s it.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
Want to hear another conversation with a legendary investor mapping the AI race and the US–China contest? Listen to my conversation with Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley, in which we discussed the AI bubble debate, circular deals and SPV chaos, angel investing in the AI era, his ten-day deep dive across six Chinese cities, the Xiaomi SU7 factory tour, Lei Jun as “the Steve Jobs of China,” America vs. China (lawyers vs. engineers), regulatory capture, why the IPO market is broken, stablecoins putting Visa and Mastercard on notice, and much more.
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