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  • Published: 5 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781405968065
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

These Strange New Minds

How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means




All you need to know about the technology that is revolutionising our world, in language anyone can understand, and from an AI pioneer.

Thanks to recent advances in AI, humans have entered a world where we are no longer the sole custodians of knowledge. A new wave of disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us - and are beginning to transform everything we do. It is vital we understand how they work. Can AI ‘think’, 'know' and ‘understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?

To answer these questions, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield charts the evolution of AI, from its earliest origins in the seventeenth century to today’s Large Language Models, new tools that put the knowledge of all the world’s experts at your fingertips. The resulting book is the most accessible, up-to-date and authoritative exploration of this radical new technology. Ultimately, armed with an understanding of AI’s mysterious inner workings, we can begin to grapple with the existential question of our age: have we written ourselves out of history or is a technological utopia ahead?

  • Published: 5 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781405968065
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00

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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