Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Truth About AI They Don't Want You To Know - Sebastian Mallaby

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

Sebastian Mallaby is back as a repeat guest on Open Book, with a brilliant new book. He spent 30 hours inside the mind of the man building superintelligence, and what he found should wake all of us up. We're talking about Demis Hassabis, the chess prodigy-turned-AI god who founded DeepMind before Sam Altman even had the idea for OpenAI. This is one of the most important books I've read in years, and after this conversation, I promise you, you will never think about AI, China, or the future of your kids the same way again. Sebastian Mallaby is the author of several books, including the bestselling More Money Than God. A former Financial Times contributing editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. This book must be read at this time: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. Get it here: https://amzn.to/48dShY4 Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://linktr.ee/anthonyscaramucci⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Conditions apply. Jeffrey Hinton, I've had the opportunity to interview him. He's of course known as the godfather of AI. He fears for human survival. How seriously should the rest of us take the argument about the existential risk? So I got up to Toronto one day to see Jeffrey Hinton and we discuss it. I say, why are you so worried? Because why would the machines want to attack us?

And he goes, okay, imagine you've got a really intelligent AI and you're worried that some enemy of yours is going to hack it with a cyber attack. Now you have to protect your AI. Humans are not smart enough to do anti-scycy. cyber attack in real time. So you have to empower your own AI that if it sees an attack coming, it counterattacks, defends itself, it survives. So now you've given your AI a survival instinct, and it's smarter than you. Are you sure you're feeling is uncomfortable now, Sebastian? I'm not so comfortable. I don't wake up every morning worrying about existential risk,

but I do think intellectually, analytically, it's impossible to say this isn't the risk. I think we should take it seriously. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci, us today is best-selling author, Sebastian Malaby. He's written an incredible book. And the title of the book is The Infinity Machine. Demis Hasebis, Deep Mind in the Quest for Super Intelligence. And Sebastian is the Paul A. Volker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations. My law school classmate, Mike Frommon, is running the Council of Foreign Relations. Now, small world. That's right. Let's go. First of all, it's, Great to have you back. We've done this before. You've written about a lot of fun things for me. I

loved your book about the Federal Reserve and Greenspan and the whole thing. And the hedge fund book, I learned more about the hedge fund industry from you than being in the hedge fund industry for 30 years. So I give you a lot of credit for that as well. But this book is about the future. I felt like I was reading a book from 2032. You're explaining to me or explaining to the, reader what's going to happen. But what's true you to Demis Hasibis, if I'm pronoun his name right, and I apologize if I yet, and he's a co-founder and CEO of Google Deep Mind. But this young man has an incredible story. I mean, I say a young man because he starts out as a 13-year-old chess prodigy. I know he's 50 now, but this guy's a true genius, Sebastian. And so

tell me why you've focused on him. And of course, you weave in this very broad narrative about what's going on of the world of artificial intelligence. Well, one of the incredible things about Demis Sassabis is that he had this vision to build a really powerful artificial intelligence when he was still in his teens, and it was the mid-1990s. So get that. I mean, you know, AI couldn't even recognize a picture of a cat until 2012. So this guy is like 15, 17 years early.

And so through his life and his thinking, and the incredible evolution of his ideas, one can tell the story of them making a modern AI like through his story. And so I always love to do both the figure and the landscape behind the figure. You need a character. You also need a big, meaty theme.

Demis provided that. Are you impressed with the progress of AI? I feel like when I'm using AI, and I've sort of addicted to it now, I use Chad GBT, Gemini, I use Claude. I feel like I've picked up three or four partners who are 250 IQ partners

that can more or less help me on just about anything. Are you impressed with how far they've gotten so far? What's your thought on where we are in terms of the progress of this incredible software? I mean, I think the progress has been amazing. If you think back to chat GPT in November of 2022, You had a system that hallucinated all the time. You know, you would ask it, you know, tell me about my wife,

and it would award her a gratuitous PhD, which she doesn't have, just to be, you know, it's hallucinating. And then about six months later, the hallucination was massively reduced. And then these systems got very, very long memory. So you could put it in a whole Tolstoy novel into the context window and query the system about that. Then they could do video and they could do pictures. Then they could do reasoning.

mathematics, logic, science, all that stuff. Next thing is they're becoming agenic, so they can actually take care of actions for you. Then the new thing over the horizon is going to be world models that teach these systems about how the physical world looks, and that's going to be fantastic for robotics. So, you know, yeah, I think the progress is super fast. And it's going exponential, right? I mean, there's going to be super intelligence here before we know it, and we'll talk a little about my fear of that and perhaps maybe yours, but let's go to this fascinating character,

Mr. Hasibus. Is that how you pronounce his name? It's actually Hasabas, but you're not far off. That's Sabas. Okay. So he's a chess prodigy. He's a game designer. He's a neuroscientist. He's an entrepreneur. You spent 30 hours interviewing him. What surprised you the most about him once you got past the public persona. Yeah. Well, it's completely true that I spent this huge amount of time. I stopped counting at 30 hours. Really, I've written about lots of fascinating, interesting, smart people, but he is on a

different level. You know, we would meet in this London pub near his home, and there was a kind of secret staircase at the back. We would go up and there would be this dusty room. We sit there for two hours. And he would just riff on intelligence and life. science and computer science, which movies he loved, why he, you know, why he thinks what he thinks and how he thinks.

It's just fascinating because it really goes all the way from sort of, you know, physics to football. And so, you know, I think if you ask the question, what was surprising, one of the things was that I thought going in, the project here would be partly to describe what it feels like for a scientist to have his hands on the 21st century equivalent of the nuclear material. This guy's inventing this artificial intelligence which could be super dangerous. Does he sleep? I mean, is he worried?

What's that like? And I was a bit nervous about posing that question directly to somebody. Hey, what's it like to feel that you might be kidding and so on? But he brings it up himself. He's obsessed with the parallels between nuclear power and AI power. And that was a big surprise to me. You know, you say, you know, because I've obviously in preparation for this, I finished the book last night, by the way, I had a, I powered through it because I didn't want to,

I didn't want to show up this morning without reading the whole thing. And then I did look at some of the other things that you've, you've done. You say it's not a Silicon Valley story. Hmm. What do you mean by that, Sebastian? Well, you know, surprisingly, this is a person who grew up in North London and built his company in London, recruited and retained scientists in London. And so it isn't a Silicon Valley company.

He did raise capital by coming out to the valley and getting the first check out of Peter Thiel, then raised money from Elon Musk, then raise a ton of money by selling his company to Google. So it's not like totally disconnected from Silicon Valley, but I think there is a different mentality of doing deep science as opposed to always hustling for the next product. And this is a very long horizon project, right? He starts the company in 2010. That's a fully, you know, five years before Sam Wulman had the idea for Open AI. And, you know, he's working on even inventing what a machine intelligence could be like.

He studied neuroscience and got a PhD in neuroscience because he wanted to understand human intelligence as the existence proof that intelligence could even exist, right? And so he was really beginning at the very beginning of this story. And that's not something Silicon Valley does so much. But the Silicon Valley is more about, A, where's something where we can build a product and ship it in a couple of years. And this was very different. Well, I mean, listen, I mean, you do a wonderful job of explaining him. And he's a non-Siligan Valley guy, right?

He sold his business, if I remember correctly, for less money and less control than he was actually offered. It's like, that's almost unheard of. And so what does that tell you about how he thinks and his philosophy? Well, you know, he told me from the start that he was not motivated by money. And of course, I was always a bit skeptical initially. But then you hear these stories like, first of all, when he was... I'm motivated by money, Sebastian, by the way, if you didn't know.

But let's go back to him. I'm sorry. Somebody tells me that I'm motivated by money. I don't believe him either. I think we could do a whole different podcast about you. You know, Anthony, you're fascinating. No, no, I just, when someone says they're not motivated by money, my first reaction is, okay, that's a bunch of, I'll use a Joe Biden term as a bunch of malarkey.

But I believe him and I believe you. So tell me how we, because you were successful in first, how did you get over the skepticism, I guess, is what I'm trying to get at, you know? Sure. I mean, the first example was, you know, when he was 18, he had already coded up a video game which sold more than five million copies. And so his boss at the video game studio. was desperate to keep him because he was this genius that could like, you know, just generate tons of revenue.

And so he said, listen, you don't need to go to college. Forget that. Here's a check. If you stay with me, cash this check. And it was basically more than one million dollars in today's money for a 17 or 18-year-old who came from a modest family. No money in the background, right? And, yeah, in Stanford, people drop out all the time. And, you know, they would have said, sure, you know, I'm off to a Y Combinator. And, you know, the hell with college. No, no, no. Damien Sassabbe says, I prefer knowledge to money. And he goes to college, and he never cashes that check for more than a million bucks.

Next thing happens, as you said, Anthony, you know, he was offered by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. More money to sell the company to Facebook. He turned it down because he thought Zach was a bit flaky. He wasn't for real when it came to understanding why AI mattered. Whereas he thought Larry Page was a kind of more cerebral computer scientist. Could have been a professor in a different life. So he sold to Google instead. And then you fast forward.

And at the end of my research with him, I sat there in that pub. And I said, okay, you say you don't care about money. But let's just check this. What kind of card does your family drive? He goes, I think it's 11 years old. I can't remember what it's called. Okay, where do you live? Have you moved houses since you sold the company to Google?

No, I've been in the same house 12 years. All right. Second home, forget it. Yock. You must be joking. Well, what do you spend your money on? He says, well, I do have one extravagance. I did buy a couple of season tickets to my favorite soccer club, football club, Liverpool.

And I say, okay, how much that cost? I think it was about $3,000, right? So $5,000. I mean, that's the full extent of his extravagance, as far as I can tell. To me, it's impressive because it speaks to he, he's almost like an AI monk, Sebastian. You know, he had this, like, religious calling. You know, when I'm finishing your book, I'm like, okay, this is a very unique person. And maybe because he was raised in North London, Sebastian, culturally, he's different from

these guys that are Americans that end up in Silicon Valley. But I want to go to Deep Mind for a second. So, and I would like you to talk about it for people that don't follow this closely. What exactly is Deep Mind? what are they trying to achieve? So yeah, Deep Mind is the company the Dem is set up in London in 2010 and the mission was

not modest. It was solve intelligence to solve everything else. So the idea was we're going to create these crazy intelligent AI systems and then we're going to figure out the deep mysteries of physics, biology, material sciences and that will allow us to

unlock tons of fantastic new medicines. It would allow us to do much better material science. can reduce climate change because we can get a ban any source of energy. Any major boffle neck and human flourishing you can think of, that's what we're going to solve. So this was the vision. You know, it's easy to have a big vision, but then you have to deliver. And I think what's super impressive about him is that he combined this very, very pushy, long range goal with like a practical day-to-day, okay, how do I build the next step in the ladder? And the key

The insight he had was there was two kinds of artificial intelligence. One is called deep learning where you basically suck up tons of data and learn from the data. The other is called reinforcement learning where you do experiments, you try and an error and you get feedback. Did my action work? Did it not produce a good result? And he combined the two. And that was the magic that set him on a road to building, you know, to be the first to

build AI. So Jeffrey Hinton, I've had the opportunity to interview him. He's, of course, known as the godfather of AI. He fears for human survival, right? You know this, right? And you know that apocalyptic stance. How seriously should the rest of us take the argument about the existential risk? Well, for the first couple of years of my research, I was wandering around with this happy idea that, sure, the machines would be smarter than us, but they won't have a motive, a reason, to damage us to harm.

because, you know, we are evolved over centuries to survive. The survival instinct is like the strongest thing inside us. Machines don't have that. So why would they attack us, you know, whatever? So I got up to Toronto one day to see Jeffrey Hinton. He's a professor at the university there, and I sit in his kitchen for two hours. And we discuss it. I say, why are you so worried?

Because why would the machines want to attack us? And he goes, okay, imagine you've got a really intelligent AI. and you're worried that some enemy of yours is going to hack it with a cyber attack. Now you have to protect your AI, but humans are not smart enough to do anti-cyber attack in real time. So you have to empower your own AI that if it sees an attack coming, it counterattacks, defends itself, it survives. So now you've given your AI a survival instinct, and it's smarter than you. Are you sure you're feeling is uncomfortable now, Sebastian? And I'm like, not so comfortable.

So I, look, I don't wake up every morning worrying about existential risk because I'm not wired that way. But I do think intellectually, analytically, it's impossible to say this isn't the risk. I think we should take it seriously. Okay, I'm going to say it back to you because I'm going to say it to you in a way that I interpreted it from your book and I want to get your reaction. It came across to me that this man understands how the brain works, and he understands that it's an electrical circuit, and a result of which he can create an external electrical circuit that will work faster and more intelligently than the brain.

And so therefore, it is an additional layer of evolvement. So said differently, these centuries or millennials that you're talking about of survival, he's putting it into the new brain. which is this electronic circuit and this brain is on a voltage. It's an electronic circuit. It's a result of which it will be exponentially more powerful than anything that we've ever seen. And so when I closed this book last night, when I closed it, I said, I don't think the people, Sebastian, I don't think the people around the world understand it, which is why I'd like to hang. You know, when I, I told Caddy, I bought a hundred of these books. handing it out to people, but I want people to understand what's going on. So you have a few minutes here. I want you to give me the message. Let's say you're talking to my 89-year-old mother or you're

talking to somebody that's not college educated about this. What is it that they need to know? Look, I think you said it beautifully just then. If you can understand the brain is an electrical circuit, you can build this external inversion and it's going to be super powerful. So I think what we need to know is that it's coming. I think it's helpful to understand what it is and how it was built. And so in some sense, reading my book as a form of therapy, as we get our mind around the future, we need to understand who is this person who created it.

Why did he do it? And maybe the fact that, you know, I think he is a sincerely good person who wants to develop the upside and do it for science. and he's already invented a system that unravels all of the shapes and proteins in nature, which is going to accelerate new medicines and stuff. There is a positive side to all this, so we shouldn't freak out too much. But we should be realistic that lots of analytical tasks that you and I can do in front of a computer,

those are going to be done better, faster, cheaper by machines. So I think we need to double down on the human, the human side of us, which is good at human-to-human interaction, in some sense this conversation, is an example of this. And just remember, for example, that, you know, machines have been better than humans at chess since 1997. And yet more people play chess and more humans watch humans playing chess than ever before in history. So I think we're going to find out new ways of flourishing. But it will mean, you know, doubling down on what you love, figuring out the people you love,

that human to human side. And then we'll be okay. So I want to go back now, okay? More money than gosh. Take you back probably 15 years now, right? I want you to think about the research that you did for that book. And I want you to now overlay this book because I think there's a relationship between capital

and transformative technology. And I want you to relate those two books together. And I guess the core question is AI different. from what came before in terms of the allocation of capital. Well, strictly on the capital market side, I would say the big thing about AI is it's so capital intensive. You need so much money. And so if you look at what Open AI is doing,

and I pick them because, you know, they are not owned by a big company like Google, so they have to go to the capital markets and raise money. And they're doing that through private transactions. But the size of these transactions is the biggest in the history of capitalism. It used to be that the biggest ever fundraise in an IPO with Saadio Remko, they raised less than 30 billion. Now these guys have raised, you know, 41 billion last year. They had a headline deal just now, 120 billion.

I think there's a lot of smoking mirrors in that, but still, you know, it's way bigger than any private fundraising as well. So I think just the scale of the capital is off the charts. It's going to change the shape of global interest rates. Interest rates will go out for everybody because all of the capital is being sucked. out by these guys. The cost of power, electricity goes out for everybody because these guys are hogging so much electricity. So that's a sort of strictly capital markets point. I would say, though, that, you know, hedge fund people are brilliantly exploiting the rules in the financial market. And they're finding kinks and opportunities and sort of inefficiencies and they are

trading those out. And there's a lot of intellectual creativity that goes into that. And when I wrote my book more money than God. You know, it was kind of like a not a who done it, but a how done it. How do these people do it? How did they think up the ideas that generated profits in the stock market? Demis Sábes with AI is not playing within a set of rules. He is writing a new set of rules. Entirely new way we're going to bring up our kids who, you know, maybe don't learn to write because this machine can write for them. A new way of us working because some of our jobs will be taken. a new way of how we think of ourselves as being human, because now we have this rival form of cognition in a machine.

So I think there's a difference between playing in a rule set and then inventing a different set of rules. Okay, so I wasn't frightened by this stuff. I have to confess to you that using it, I'm like, okay, this is awesome. I read your book, and I'm a tiny bit frightened now. You know, I'm not apocalyptic about it, But I want you to explain to our viewers and listeners what AGI is. What is artificial general intelligence?

And then who gets there? Who gets there first? And does it matter, Sebastian, who gets there first? Well, I think, first of all, HGI, you can, you know, people to have different definitions. It's very powerful intelligence. Maybe we could define this where most tasks that humans do on a computer can be done better, faster, cheaper, buy an AI. And we're not quite there yet, but we already have systems.

You can talk to them. You can ask some questions. They are artificial. They are very general in what they know. And they're very intelligent. So we're getting there. And I think in two, three years, it will no longer be a debate. We will have AGI.

Now, does it matter who gets there first? Sure. I mean, there's always a technological aspect to geopolitical and military rivalry. if you imagine the US military without any semiconductors, it wouldn't be much. And so, sure, it does matter who gets there, us or China. On the other hand, we have to remember it's not just creating the code of the AI that matters. It's like putting it into specific applications. So it's going to be powerful for a business only once they figure out how to integrate it into their workflow.

Powerful for the military, only once they figure out how they're going to use it. And that's just beginning. And I think that might take a little bit longer than the two or three years I just mentioned for HIA. You know, I have to ask this geopolitical question because it's interacting. It's interacting in the Iranian war. The report reports are the Americans are very happy with the way they were able to deploy AI. And they are also sneering at the way the Chinese were being able to deploy AI in the war. They sort of feel like the Chinese are more behind us now than they originally thought.

And so I would like to get your reaction to that sentence. Is that a true sentence or is that war propaganda? And then secondarily, what does Europe fit into the whole equation? Yeah. So the first part, what do you think? So I think the American debate should not underestimate the power of the rivals. And I just went to China for eight days because my book launched. first in China. They're super fast everything and they got the book out really fast. So I was there for

eight days and I was introduced to all of these people who were like top AI researchers in Beijing or like their chief executive of some tech company and they're implementing AI. These guys are very good, very energetic. And when you, frankly, when you go to a Chinese tech company these days, it kind of feels like you're visiting a Silicon Valley company. I mean, you know, down to the fact that, you know, they have a HR officer who's telling you about the gender balance and the top staff and they're kind of like planting trees because they're doing good stuff for the environment. I mean, really, it's pretty indistinguishable from the US. And the technology, I was taken in a completely autonomous car, which drove beautifully,

which is made by Huawei. They showed me the phones they have. They don't just fold once like this, like a Google pixel phone. They fold over three times. And there are all these new software tricks they have. You look at their cloud services. Actually, I visited InVidia in Washington, D.C. just yesterday. And I said, you know, my impression was Huawei was super-haired-old cloud

in terms of delivering useful technology to, like, you know, fixing trains, doing better mining technology, doing logistics better. You know, does anyone in the US do it quite that well? And they're like, no, Huawei is sui generis. Huawei is the combination of the consumer products of Apple, the automobile stuff of Waymo, and then, you know, kind of Azure Cloud all wrapped into one. So, you know, we should not underestimate these people. And then in Europe, yeah, you know, Europe's always been laughed at as the laggard in tech.

But guess what? The lithography machines that etched the circuits onto silicon chips are made by a Dutch company with German subsidiaries. It's a European. European outfit and they have a pretty much monopoly on the cutting edge chips on how you build them. So I think the US needs to get real about the fact that, sure, it is the leading country in the world. It still has the best tech, but not by much. And don't be arrogant about it. I've changed my view. Okay. I have now a different view of the future and also I actually have a

different view of my kids' future. So before I tell you, my mind. I'd like to hear yours. Okay, has it changed your view, this work that you've done, three years of deep research inside the story? Has it changed your view of the future and the future of your children? Yeah. I mean, I think it just makes me understand that it's super uncertain how things develop. You know, I gave you the story earlier that, you know,

people are going to adapt where human beings and we are good at finding projects to keep ourselves busy and kind of deriving purpose. from these projects. So at some sort of, you know, emotional, existential level, I think we will find things to do it will be okay. But there are going to be massive frictions along the way. And, you know, as we know, from trade disruptions, you can have a trade shock and a whole bunch of people lose their jobs.

And those people, you know, maybe the next generation figures it out and they're okay. But you get people laid off and it's really tough for them and they don't find a new job. So I'm worried. A lot of transition. One of the best lines I heard is you may not lose your job immediately to AI, but you're going to lose it to the person who knows how to use AI. Right. All right. So you've done this before with me.

So I've come up with the five words that I'd like you to comment on. I forgot this one, Anthony. I'm not ready. I'm pretty sure you're. I think pretty sure you're ready for everything, actually. So I'm going to say super intelligence and what does it make you think of? It makes me think I'm a little nervous. Yeah.

Oh, me too. What if I just say AI? AI, I feel more comfortable than I'm thinking it's a useful tool. I hear I can't do that, Dave. Remember that from Hal? Oh, yes, yes, yes. You can't do that. When I hear AI, can't do that, Dave. Google. Google, I feel like it's the juggernaut economically. It's just, you know, it's killing it on everything from AI to autonomous driving. That's an unstoppable company. right now. Yeah, and most interesting for me is Berkshire Hathaway just bought a very large swath of Google. So it's something you're thinking, okay, so I say deep mind. You say what? I say surprising London's success story. Yeah, I think it's a fascinating thing because of what you said about the

money culture in the U.S. versus the money culture in a place like North London. I think it, I think it advantaged him. It's a very interesting nuance and part of this story. I'm not going to pronounce his name. So forgive me. Demis. Hasabas? Is that how you say roughly? When I say his name, what do you think of?

Science. This deep, deep drive, almost a spiritual drive, to understand the deep mysteries of science. Yeah, I think a warrior monk, man. I think this guy is like, you want this guy on your team because he cares about things in a way differently than the rest of us.

He has an indifferent incentive alignment, Sebastian. I love that. Which makes him better, frankly, better than lots of us in terms of what he's able to do. But listen, this book is phenomenal. I'm going to be recommending it to everybody. It'll probably be the business book of the year. That's my bet on it. The title of the book is The Infinity Machine, Demis Hasabas, the deep mind and the quest for

super intelligence. And Sebastian Mali, congratulations again on an amazing book. Thank you so much. It's being a great pleasure. I'm going to steal your warrior mountain, thank you. Let's talk groceries, specifically your groceries. With Instacart, you want your groceries just the way you like them, right? Well, the Instacard app lets you do just that.

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