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  • Published: 5 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781405966177
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

These Strange New Minds

How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means




How the technology that is revolutionising our world actually works, and what that means, from the Research Director at the UK government's AI Safety Institute

Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and refashion society in unpredictable ways. We can expect these AI systems to soon be making autonomous decisions on the user’s behalf, with transformative impact on everything we do. It is vital we understand how they work.

Can AI systems ‘think’, ‘know’ and ‘understand’? Could they manipulate or deceive you, and if so, what might they make you do? Whose interests do they ultimately represent? And when will they be able to move beyond words and take actions for themselves in the real world? Ultimately, can we look forward to a technological utopia, or are we in the process of writing ourselves out of history?

  • Published: 5 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781405966177
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Praise for These Strange New Minds

An engaging, insightful and panoramic survey of where we are, why we got here and what it means. A brilliant guide to the most important technology of our times

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI & Cofounder of DeepMind

As a leading authority in both computational neuroscience and the social impacts of AI, Christopher Summerfield is perfectly situated to explore the meaning and implications of these machines that are so uncannily like – and unlike – ourselves

Brian Christian, co-author of Algorithms to Live by

The unprecedented success of Large Language Models like ChatGPT took the AI world by surprise, and sent shock waves through silicon valley. We are now at a unique moment in human history, with powerful general-purpose AI tools available for the first time. But how do these weird tools work? How will they develop? And what does it mean for humanity? AI expert Chris Summerfield takes us on a tour of this astonishing new technology, and helps us to understand the issues it raises. You might choose to be alarmed, excited, or indifferent to LLMs, but you should read Chris’s book before you decide

Mike Woolridge, author of The Road to Conscious Machines

Witty, brilliant, and deeply thought through – by far the best guide to a newly emerging species with which we will share the planet for the foreseeable future

Stuart Russell, author of Human Compatible
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