A book recommendation: Parmy Olson's Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in AI. The book tells the origin stories behind the familiar names: how ChatGPT came to be, how DeepMind ended up under Google, how Anthropic and Claude were born as a reaction to OpenAI's shift in direction, and how GitHub Copilot and Gemini entered the picture.
What I found especially fascinating is the massive amount of research behind OpenAI and how open and idealistic the starting points were for everything until business took over. Musk, Altman, Hassabis and the other key figures have been on completely different pages: some care deeply about ethics and safety, some couldn't care less. At the same time, everyone acknowledges the risks and talks about them openly, yet they all act differently.
I've been tinkering with chatbots since the MegaHAL days and as a developer I use all of these tools often, so reading the behind-the-scenes story was captivating. Won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2024, and deservedly so.
PS. If you're planning to guilt trip me about using AI or being interested in it, I'll just block you.
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