The Infinity Machine

Chapter 1

Destiny

Partway through his doctoral research in neuroscience-when he had already been a chess master, a video game designer, an amateur theoretical physicist, an entrepreneur, a computer scientist, and five-time world champion at the international Mind Sports Olympiad-Demis Hassabis discovered a work of science fiction that made sense of who he really was. The book, called Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of a diminutive boy genius who is taken from his family and sent off to a space station. There, at an intergalactic battle school, Ender is manipulated by adults, bullied by classmates, and put through extreme mental testing, all to discover whether he can shoulder responsibility for the survival of the human race. By dint of grit and talent, Ender rises to the challenge. At the climax of the novel, he outwits an army of alien invaders, destroying their armada and saving planet Earth, though the question of whether he committed genocide in the process hangs over the outcome.

Hassabis was around thirty years old when he discovered Ender, and he was so taken with the story that he asked his wife to read it. She told him she felt sorry for the central character-a boy deprived of childhood and harnessed to a mission chosen for him by adults. But Hassabis identified powerfully with Ender. He, too, had been a diminutive boy genius, socially isolated by his own prodigious talent. He, too, had undergone extreme mental testing, and was consumed by a desire to make his mark on the universe; one of his ambitions was to surpass his scientific heroes, Newton and Einstein, and "understand the fabric of reality itself." The fable of Ender-a gifted, bullied boy who saves all humanity-tapped into Hassabis's deepest preoccupations, even if (especially if!) the savior had been required to pay an immense personal price.

Some fifteen years later, now in his midforties, Hassabis sat across from me in a London restaurant, reflecting on the power of this tale. We had not stumbled on the subject by accident. Hassabis had suggested that I read the novel in advance of our first long conversation; this was a subject he wanted to tackle. If I was to get to know him, I would have to understand his science-fiction alter ego: to see the capacity for endurance, the ability to suffer and still soldier on. Like Ender, Hassabis had dedicated every fiber of his being to the accomplishment of a mission, which was why he worked night shifts from ten in the evening until around four in the morning in addition to his normal office hours. Like Ender, Hassabis felt a burden of responsibility. "If you are trying to solve humanity's problems and understand the nature of reality, you don't have any time to waste," he said.

I described this conversation to Shane Legg, one of the two cofounders who teamed up with Hassabis to form the company DeepMind. Back in 2010, when the pair of postdocs at University College London had begun fusing computer science and neuroscience, had Legg realized that he was hitching his career to someone so possessed?

At first, Legg answered warily. "I don't know if I was teaming up with a real-life Ender," he began.

But then he continued, weighing his words deliberately. "Demis has an extraordinary level of determination. Unlike pretty much anybody. Astonishing, incredible determination. That's his most defining characteristic. Just unbelievable determination."

"What do you mean?"

"He works, sleeps, eats, breathes the mission, twenty-four hours a day. To a degree that I just haven't seen with other people."

"No hobbies?"

"Football. Big fan of Liverpool. But other than that, it's the mission."

"And that was evident even back when you met him, more than a decade ago?"

"Always," Legg answered.

His face flickered, as though a memory had stirred somewhere just below the skin.

"Demis tells a story about his father saying that whether you win or lose, the really important thing is that you try your best. And Demis says he took that very literally. As in, absolutely try the absolute, absolute, absolute best you can possibly do, pretty much to the point of breaking yourself.

"That's how he is, twenty-four seven."

I nodded, kept eye contact, and hoped Legg would continue.

"I don't think his father meant his comment in quite that literal sense," Legg reflected. "Like, 'try your best' wasn't supposed to mean 'try literally to the point of destroying yourself, go absolutely, completely 100 percent.' But that's how Demis understood it.

"There is no 50 percent mode in Demis. There is not even a 99 percent mode in Demis. There is only 100 percent."


Demis Hassabis was born in modest circumstances in Finchley, North London, in July 1976. He was the eldest child of a Chinese Singaporean mother and a Greek Cypriot father, which made him an exemplary product of one of the world’s great melting pots. His mother had grown up in poverty, spending part of her childhood as an orphan on the streets of Singapore, eventually finding shelter with a benevolent relative and moving to London to study nursing. When Demis was small, she worked as a sales assistant at the John Lewis department store and took part-time jobs as a cleaner. Demis’s father had been the first from his family to attend university, but he was too much of a bohemian free spirit to abide office work. He was an aspiring singer-songwriter and sold toys out of the back of a beaten-up red Volkswagen van.

In contrast with his family circumstances, the young Demis's talents were not at all modest. When he was four, he climbed up on a chair to watch his father play chess against his uncle. Within a few weeks, he had mastered the game well enough to defeat adults. At five, he began competing in tournaments, sitting on a telephone book on top of two stacked chairs so that he could get his head above the table, and frequently beating older kids. A primary school teacher noted his unusual mix of levity and seriousness. Demis was "sparkling." He was also relentlessly competitive.

When Demis was six, he qualified to compete in the British Under 14 championship, winning two of his matches before falling asleep at the table when a game stretched into the evening, way beyond his bedtime. After watching the two victories, Leonard Barden, the beloved patriarch of English chess, approached Demis's father. Barden had played internationally during the 1950s and 1960s, later becoming a well-known chess columnist and television commentator. Now he sought out Demis's father to deliver the kind of message that parents love and dread.

"Your son is the best six-year-old I've ever seen," Barden said.

"What are you going to do when someone tells you that?" Hassabis reflected. "My parents were fairly normal people living fairly normal lives. And a renowned expert is telling you this."

Demis's father responded to Barden's message as though instruction had been handed down from God. For the next half dozen years, weekend after weekend, he bundled his young prodigy into the family's red VW van and drove him off to tournaments in shabby, far-flung church halls, leaving his wife with the two younger children and her various jobs. Sometimes the father-son duo spent the night in sleeping bags laid out over the engine at the back of the VW; other times they found a cheap hostel and shared a bunk bed. If Demis won the tournament, the prize money would cover the hostel fees, but his mother still fretted about the cost of the travel. "She grew up in absolute poverty," Hassabis said later. "I imagine my parents had a lot of arguments about money, because we didn't have much."

Demis's chess progress continued. At nine, he was the captain of England's Under 11 team. At thirteen, he reached the rank of chess master and was the second-strongest competitor in his age group, worldwide. But the pressures kept on mounting. Chess consumed every weekend and every day of school vacation, squeezing out the easy recreation of normal childhood. Long hours of training were punctuated by acute moments of match play, when everything came down to nerves and stamina and unplanned flashes of insight. The competition was vicious: There were wooden boards under the tables to prevent players from kicking each other. Like Ender, Demis could barely imagine what "just living" might mean. He had never tried it out.

Demis's father was taking progressively more time away from his work and his music to keep driving him to tournaments, which only redoubled the pressure on his son. When the boy had a bad game, the father would erupt.

"There was one time, I was a rook up and then lost horribly, and my dad went mental," Hassabis remembered.

"He was screaming, 'How could you have done this? This is unbelievable. How could you have just thrown this away?'

"It was just awful. We were out in some hostel, and he was going on about this, screaming. And this used to be a fairly regular occurrence with my dad.

"So I said to him, 'This is ridiculous. I obviously tried my best. I'm not intentionally losing.' And that was that. I wasn't going to take it anymore. That was the last time I remember him screaming at me, whereas he used to all the time before.

"I think I'm quite an empathetic person," Hassabis continued. "I can take the other person's position, and I know that this was done through love. If you met my dad now, you would be like, 'This can't be the same person,' because he's so laid-back and chilled out.

"But this is just how he was around chess. It was probably to do with, I don't know, my mum pressurizing him. Like, why doesn't he have a normal job? And maybe I wouldn't become a champion and this was all a waste of time."

During one of our long conversations, I asked about the story that Shane Legg had told me: the one about Demis's father telling him that, win or lose, what mattered was to do his best.

"I think my dad meant it in a comforting way," Hassabis stipulated.

"But then, he didn't really mean it that way, or why would he have been so angry when I lost a match?

"Anyway," he continued, flashing a grin of rueful self-awareness, "the slightly warped way I took that was, how do you know you've done your best?

"The only way I could know is basically if I pushed myself to the point just before death. Because that is literally when you have done your best. If you die-by die, I mean burn out or something-then you've slightly overdone it.

"It's like running a marathon. You have to basically fall over the line. And then ideally you should be hospitalized, but not dead. That's when you can say you've done your best. But if you've got any energy left, you're still standing, maybe you could have tried harder?

"That's how I took it. I must have been about nine or ten."


One of Hassabis’s earliest childhood memories involves winning the London Under 8 chess championship and going up to get the trophy. In the film reel of his mind, he walks up to a figure holding a silver cup, eagerly receives the prize, and turns triumphantly to face the audience. Then his gaze fixes on the runner-up, a future grandmaster and close friend, who sobs uncontrollably as his father berates him.

The thin line between exultation and breakdown was a constant feature of the tournament circuit. "A lot of my chess friends got destroyed," Hassabis recalled later. "They ended up drinking, or getting burned out." At the age of eleven, Hassabis experienced his own moment of existential torment. Paradoxically, it freed him.

Hassabis was doing battle at an international competition near Liechtenstein. The way he remembers the episode, he was pitted against an experienced Danish master, a man old enough to be his father. The Dane was a chain-smoker, and the match stretched on for almost ten hours, entering an unusual endgame. Hassabis still had his queen; the Dane had a rook, bishop, and knight. Time ticked by as the pieces circled the board, and the tournament hall gradually emptied as kings were cornered and toppled on the other tables around them. Then, eventually, the equilibrium broke. The Dane trapped Hassabis's king. Checkmate looked inevitable.

Shocked and physically exhausted, Hassabis capitulated.

Immediately, his opponent leapt to his feet. "Why have you resigned?" Hassabis remembers him asking.

With a flourish, the victor showed the boy the move he should have made. If Hassabis had sacrificed his queen, the match would have ended in a stalemate.

The Dane's friends crowded around and joined in the jeering. For the rest of the day, Hassabis felt sick to his stomach. But the next morning he experienced an epiphany. That tournament hall near Liechtenstein had been packed with brilliant brains, dueling over black and white squares until stamina was drained to nothing. Surely that immense collective mental effort should have been harnessed to some higher cause-science, say, or medicine? "I thought we were wasting our minds," Hassabis said later.

For nearly all his conscious life, Hassabis had assumed he would grow up to be a chess professional. His father earnestly believed that, too: No less an oracle than Leonard Barden, the father of English chess, had foretold his son's destiny. But now Hassabis resolved that there must be something more: a mission, a purpose.

What followed were some happy years when Hassabis continued to play chess but refused to be possessed by it. He remained ferociously competitive, of course. Dharshan Kumaran, the friend who was in tears after losing the London Under 8 championship, remembers Demis as a teenager, gesturing at the stronger players seated at a tournament's top boards, and declaring with determination, "We're better than all those people!" But to the surprise of many in the chess fraternity, Hassabis also began to compete in other mind games: bridge and backgammon, Diplomacy and draughts, as well as the Japanese chess variant shogi. His versatility was even more striking than his prowess at chess: After university, he went on to win a record string of gold medals at the five-game international Mind Sports Olympiad. "What Demis did with shogi was really impressive," a chess veteran reflected. "Another complicated game and he got to the top of the English rankings," said another. But Hassabis could scarcely imagine why he wouldn't sample other challenges. The world offered so many enthralling ways to test his mental acumen.

The more Hassabis multiplied his hobbies and interests, the more he collected friends around him. In his younger years, he had cut a solitary figure: With Asian looks, a foreign name, and an outlandish intelligence, he had not exactly gelled with the other kids at the local government school that he attended-"I was like this alien," he remembered. Around the age of ten, he had skipped classes entirely for a year to focus on chess, keeping up with the curriculum by reading textbooks in his bedroom. When he was fourteen, he dropped out again, teaching himself two years of the school syllabus at double speed so that he could take the national GCSE exams early. It seems likely that this social isolation contributed to his manic drive. Lacking the scaffolding of friendship, his route to affirmation was to achieve something extraordinary.