We're publishing an exclusive chapter from @scmallaby's brilliant new book about Demis Hassabis and DeepMind. This is the inside story of Project Mario. How DeepMind's co-founders spent 4 years trying every mechanism they could think of to put guardrails around AGI, only to watch each one fail, and conclude that the only safeguard was themselves. It reveals that Hassabis ran a secret hedge fund team inside DeepMind trying to beat Renaissance Technologies; Mustafa Suleyman assembled lawyers for a $5 billion walkaway plan; Reid Hoffman committed $1 billion of his personal fortune to back them; Google kept saying yes and no at the same time—and the endless negotiations left Hassabis so distracted that when the transformer paper dropped in 2017, he was less alert to its significance than he might have been. Meanwhile, OpenAI was fighting the mirror-image battle with Musk, Altman, and Sutskever tearing each other apart over the same question: who gets to control AGI? Musk proposed folding OpenAI into Tesla. When that failed, he stormed out. When OpenAI's nonprofit board finally tried to assert authority in 2023, it was crushed in days. Both camps arrived at the same unsettling conclusion, that governance structures don't hold. The best safeguard either side could come up with? Trust us. Read the chapter in the link below.
