Supremacy

February 1, 2024

Olson (We Are Anonymous), a tech writer at Bloomberg, details the battle between the world's two leading AI firms and cautions readers about the threat of AI that's being ignored by its top creators--the profit-driven spread of flawed and biased technology into industries, education, media, and more. With a 75K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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July 8, 2024
This animated report from Olson (We Are Anonymous), a technology columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, recounts the competition between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis to bring artificial intelligence software to market. She explains how Altman’s belief that it was in humanity’s best interest for OpenAI to create the technology as soon as possible led him to abandon the organization’s nonprofit status so it could partner with and receive funding from Microsoft. Hassabis followed a similar trajectory, establishing DeepMind in 2010 out of a desire to develop AI capable of answering “where humans had come from and what their purpose was” before he sold the company to Google to secure long-term funding. Though Olson frames the narrative as a clash of titans, there’s surprisingly little direct conflict between Altman and Hassabis, aside from a tense 2020 dinner during which Hassabis accused Altman of enabling bad actors by releasing GPT-3 (the precursor to ChatGPT) to the public. Nonetheless, Olson’s punchy prose and eye for detail brings her subjects to vivid life (she writes that Altman is “bright as any geek, charismatic as any jock”). Though somewhat lacking in drama, this attests to how quickly humanitarian ideals devolve into brazen profit-seeking in Silicon Valley. Agent: David Fugate, Launch Books.

August 15, 2024
How the pursuit of artificial intelligence has unfolded and what it means for humanity. Technology journalist Olson explores here the pioneering efforts of two CEOs, OpenAI's Sam Altman and DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, as they have led the development of revolutionary AI technologies. The book tracks their ascent to positions of extraordinary power, along with the gradual erosion of their idealism about the roles they might play in ensuring that the products they helped create would be devoted to ethical aims and the advancement of human welfare. We gain a jarringly clear sense of the radical social and economic changes already being brought about by AI and of at least some of the risks posed by them. Reckless greed and ambition, the author demonstrates, are driving innovation in this immensely lucrative field, and very little regulatory oversight exists to curb dangers that range from economic collapse spurred by the disappearance of industries taken over by machines to the even more sensational prospect of human annihilation at the hands of superintelligent robots. High-tech firms, we learn, have "cut corners and misled the public about their products, putting themselves on course to become highly questionable stewards of AI." One immediate consequence of such deceptions, rendered vividly in discussions of notorious examples of racist and sexist results generated by AI, is that the technology reproduces the toxic prejudices of the data that trains it. As Olson ominously concludes of Altman and Hassabis: "They joined a long history of innovators who tweaked their ideals to stay in a race and build power. The result is some of the most transformative technology we have ever seen. Now to find out the price." An accessible, insightful exploration of the history and evolving impact of AI technologies.

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Starred review from September 1, 2024
The current ascendancy of artificial intelligence has been driven mostly by two men: Sam Altman, creator of ChatGPT, and Demis Hassabis, creator of DeepMind. Both idealists, Altman and Hassabis are driven by a conviction that AI can solve society's deepest problems and make things better for humankind. Both men set out to ensure AI would be developed responsibly and kept out of the hands of profit-driven Big Tech corporations, and both men soon enough sold control of their creations to Microsoft and Google. This is a tale of competitive nature run amok, where the need to be first led to the abandonment of cautious plans in favor of rapid development and poorly planned deployment. It's a frankly terrifying expos� of the dangers posed by the current, unregulated technology market. Perhaps most importantly, Olson warns against our popular obsession over the existential threat AI poses to humanity at the cost of ignoring real harms AI is already causing: it perpetuates bias and fuels polarization in society and removes human oversight from crucial decisions that affect people's lives. Olson's warning is clear; we're losing control over our own creation. Add this to the growing stack of recent books sounding the alarm about unchecked tech.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.