Supremacy
AI, ChatGPT and the Race that Will Change the World
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From award-winning journalist Parmy Olson, Supremacy is the astonishing, untold, behind-the-scenes story of the battle between two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the dangerous direction that they’re now going in.
"They declined his offer too, not realizing how much the thin-skinned Musk didn’t like it when people said no. Soon enough though, Hassabis got another email. This time, it was from Google."
When ChatGPT was released, the world changed overnight. Even as we all played with the new toy, a very real danger was quickly coming to light: that untested automations would undermine our way of life insidiously, sucking value out of our economy, replacing high-level creative jobs and enabling a new, terrifying era of disinformation.
It was never meant to be this way. The founders of the two companies behind the most advanced AIs in existence – Open AI (ChatGPT) and DeepMind (Bard) – started their journeys determined to solve humanity’s greatest problems. But they couldn’t develop their technologies without huge amounts of money – money that Microsoft and Google were more than happy to give them, in exchange for the most powerful seats at the table.
From award-winning journalist Parmy Olson, Supremacy is the astonishing, untold, behind-the-scenes story of the battle between two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the dangerous direction that they’re now going in. Featuring a cast of larger-than-life characters, including Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel, Supremacy is a story of manipulation, exploitation, secrecy and of ruthless, relentless human progress – progress that will impact all of us for years to come.
Customer Reviews
Informative, if alarming at times
4.5 stars
The author is an American journalist, previously a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, now a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology regulation, artificial intelligence, and social media. Her 2012 book We Are Anonymous about the hacking collective of the same name won several awards. Supremacy was FT Business Book of the Year for 2024.
This is a history of two AI companies (OpenAI and DeepMind), and a biography of the men behind them: Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, and their quest to take AI mainstream. Both were computer whizz kids who turned out to be excellent businessmen as well. Hassabis took the lead when he snagged a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for his contributions to protein structure prediction.
The reportage is highly professional and well referenced. Cameos from colourful characters like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk add to the narrative.
Bottom line
Hubris is common in the tech industry. In some cases, it’s justified.