Supremacy AI, ChatGPT, and the race that will change the world

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 exposé 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.

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. (Sept.)