Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for worldwide economics on the Council on Overseas Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the creator of six books, together with Extra Cash Than God, The Energy Regulation, The Man Who Knew, and The World’s Banker.
His newest e book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.
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Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Classes from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Faith of AI, and Recognizing Breakthroughs Early
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Transcripts
Present Notes
- Join with Sebastian Mallaby:
Books
Really useful Studying, Watching, & Listening
Related Tim Ferriss Present Episodes
Movies
Individuals
Firms & Organizations
Establishments
AI Techniques & Instruments
Ideas
Timestamps
- [00:00:00] Begin.
- [00:02:11] The twinkly eyed polymath who turned Sebastian’s subsequent e book.
- [00:06:55] Choosing the subsequent e book venture the best way an important VC picks a startup.
- [00:09:41] Why God retains crashing the superintelligence get together.
- [00:11:13] Shane Legg’s grainy 2009 prophecy — and the nervous giggle.
- [00:13:11] Ilya Sutskever burns an effigy.
- [00:13:54] Demis at 4 a.m., searching God’s algorithm.
- [00:18:43] Tremendous-abundance, Mad Max, and the China shock lesson.
- [00:22:39] The kitchen debate with Geoff Hinton that flipped Sebastian.
- [00:24:06] Why a zero-percent probability of doom is indefensible.
- [00:24:52] Will Washington seize the labs? The Mythos wake-up name.
- [00:27:18] Anthropic’s bull case, bear case, and a useless dad or mum’s letter.
- [00:33:24] The place Sebastian and Benedict Evans half methods.
- [00:38:16] Is the SaaS apocalypse overdone? One phrase: Palantir.
- [00:39:53] The AI good friend you’ll by no means change.
- [00:41:56] Does Google win client AI by default?
- [00:44:45] 4 cities, eight days: China really talks security.
- [00:47:28] A Chilly Warfare non-proliferation playbook for AI.
- [00:49:45] Did the chip export controls really work?
- [00:51:49] Burned doves: why Washington swears China gained’t speak.
- [00:54:56] “By 2028, the race is over” — one lab boss’ guess.
- [00:59:11] Inside Hikvision: toddlers, sensors, and US sanctions.
- [01:01:07] Invoice Gurley’s Uber guess: enterprise capital perfected.
- [01:05:18] Luke Nosek bear-hugs DeepMind into existence.
- [01:10:52] Thiel’s heresy: by no means make investments by committee.
- [01:11:59] How Founders Fund almost fumbled the deal of the century.
- [01:14:30] Promoting to Google for $650M: a secret British heist?
- [01:16:41] The Traitorous Eight, gardening go away, and the UK’s to-do checklist.
- [01:20:55] Ender’s Recreation: “That’s actually how I see myself.”
- [01:23:42] Too dumb for Gödel, Escher, Bach? Possibly an LLM may help.
- [01:25:19] If not Demis or Sam, then Dario.
- [01:26:04] My royalties cliff — and what dropped in late 2022.
- [01:27:47] Lila Sciences and the labs that run themselves.
- [01:31:13] Sebastian’s billboard: “Put together your thoughts.”
- [01:35:14] The one factor Sebastian won’t ever outsource to AI.
- [01:40:09] Parting ideas.
Sebastian Mallaby Quotes from the Interview
“These machines will probably be smarter than us. They’ll need to survive and they are often misleading, they will obfuscate, they will go behind your again, fake they’re doing one factor after which really do one other. All of this has been proven in all of the exams of the fashions. And so we put these issues collectively, I believe your chance of doom can’t be zero.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“For people, to ponder annihilation is absurd and the absurd is an in depth cousin of humor.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“All by this matter there’s this non secular expression as a result of faith is the lexicon for coping with one thing that we discover too mysterious to actually perceive.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“I believe any affordable individual must be each excited and a bit frightened, and that’s simply the character of it. It sounds contradictory, however really, that’s the one rational response.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
“We solely have to be forward for the subsequent couple of years, as a result of by 2028 we are going to get to recursive self-improvement, the place the frontier mannequin codes, by itself, the subsequent frontier mannequin, and progress simply goes vertical, and at that time with recursive self-improvement, we’re carried out. The race is over. Whoever comes first at that time, that’s it.”
— Sebastian Mallaby
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