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Robert Wright's Nonzero
Demis Hassabis and the Quest for AGI (Robert Wright & Sebastian Mallaby)
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Demis Hassabis and the Quest for AGI (Robert Wright & Sebastian Mallaby)

This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app. If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Teaser
0:48 The Infinity Machine, Sebastian’s book about Demis Hassabis
3:04 Why tell the AI story through Hassabis?
6:54 Hassabis vs the other AI titans
15:39 Does Hassabis have a messiah complex?
29:47 Deep learning’s secret sauce
36:51 Did world models cost DeepMind its LLM lead?
45:20 Why they call Hassabis “the Jedi”
51:52 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Sebastian Mallaby (Council on Foreign Relations, More Money Than God, The Infinity Machine). Recorded August 19, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

0:00 Mythos, the OpenAI breakout, and the state of AI safety
10:52 Why open weights =/= open source
18:26 Is China more safety-pilled than we think?
24:08 The biggest danger(s) of the AGI race

Overtime video:

This post is for paid subscribers