Supremacy
by Parmy Olson
Parmy Olson chronicles the rivalry between OpenAI's Sam Altman and DeepMind's Demis Hassabis in the race for artificial intelligence supremacy
"They joined a long history of innovators who tweaked their ideals to stay in a race and build power. Now to find out the price.".
Editorial Summary
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World is a 2024 book by Parmy Olson that won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award, exploring the story of the competition between biggest AI firms and focusing on the rivalry between OpenAI and DeepMind. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Parmy Olson uses her 13 years of experience covering technology to bring to light the exploitation of the greatest invention in human history, focusing on the continuing rivalry of two key CEOs at the center of it all, who cultivated a religion around their mission to build god-like super intelligent machines: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind. Supremacy sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence that its top creators are ignoring: the profit-driven spread of flawed and biased technology into industries, education, media and more. The book reveals how two companies with utopian ideals became entangled with tech monopolies whose power is unprecedented in history.
Perspective
"Reading this feels like getting an insider briefing from someone who has tracked every move, meeting, and maneuver in the artificial intelligence arms race, as Olson transforms corporate rivalry into a gripping narrative of ambition and consequence. The book's distinctive contribution is reframing the development of artificial intelligence as a thrilling personal rivalry between Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, showing how this war is as much one of personal style as of corporate power. Technology executives and policy makers who need to understand how idealistic AI research became profit-driven will find a sobering account of how lofty goals evolve into commercial imperatives when money and power are at stake."
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