A really interesting read that answered many questions that I had about AI. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing more about the topic.

Supremacy is a book charting the race between OpenAI and Deep Mind to bring out their AI products, focusing on their founders, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. Journalist Parmy Olson explores these two founders' starts in the tech industry, interest in AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ultimately the race between their two companies (and the tech giants behind them) to have the best AI product on the market in this generative AI age.

As someone who reads and teaches people about AI, I was interested to see how this quite recent race would be turned into a book. The narrative starts early and quite broad, looking at Altman and Hassabis' initial failures and interest in AI, as well as early tech industry contacts, and I found this part of the book was a bit too obsessed with the 'tech genius' idea, not just from them but around people like Elon Musk as well. Thankfully, as the book goes on, Olson moves away from this idea and looks more broadly at the big picture, including the struggles around both ideas of AI safety and of AI ethics, and the need for the AI world to be dominated by existing tech giants like Microsoft and Google.

The part of the book describing the invention of the 'transformer' and the impact of this on work to build better AI models was a highlight as it was an approachable explanation of why this breakthrough was so important, helping people to understand why these huge AI products seemed to come out of nowhere a few years later. I found the section that explores how effective altruism ended up connected to some of the movements in AI also interesting, showcasing how it is often the ideas of billionaires that have a massive impact on world-changing technologies. There was plenty I learnt from the book, even as someone who has a fair interest in the topic, and knowing where these companies came from is a useful part of critiquing and evaluating generative AI.

I did find that sometimes the book was so focused on tech billionaires and companies that it dragged, sometimes accepting at face value what these people say and argue for. Especially by the end, there was decent discussion of many of the issues surrounding AI, but I did think some were notably absent, particularly the climate impact of the GPU power needed and the human cost of data labelling for training data. The climate angle in particular I felt was needed, given that these companies often try and hide their negative climate cost, and it links back to other technologies like cryptocurrency that are mentioned in passing in the book. I do think that the way the book clearly distinguishes between AI safety and AI ethics, and how these can even be in conflict with each other, was very useful, especially for raising awareness of these to a general audience reading the book to learn more about the world of AI as it has become.

Overall, Supremacy is a detailed account of these two AI juggernauts over the past fifteen years and the road to get to tools like ChatGPT that have become household names, and it is a good place for people who want to know where AI has come from recently to start. For me, I found it did lean too heavily on ideas of the solitary tech genius billionaire and I wasn't interested in that much detail about conversations between them, but the book didn't go entirely in for the AI hype and did address a lot of the issues and controversies around AI at the moment.

If you feel like the discussions around AI are moving at high speed and you have missed out on them, if you are looking for expert opinion on the latest race in AI, its pros and cons, this book is for you.
We get detailed insights about the race in AI, what Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman have done, and what the future might hold. Olson’s prose is engaging and accessible hence the reader does not do the heavier work here.
The structure was not entirely ideal for me, but I took a lot out of this book. I feel I know more about AI and have been able to form my informed opinions better based on the facts and discussions provided by the author.

A vital book for understanding how we got to this current moment in AI. Framing the book as a compare and contrast between OpenAI's Sam Altman and DeepMind's Demis Hassabis is a great approach, and I feel like I learnt a lot about how both men got to where they are today. The last third or so of the book, covering the launch of ChatGPT to the present day, felt less engaging, possibly just because these events are so recent and so well covered, but it is still a good summary for anyone who hasn't been following every twist and turn. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.