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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

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

Summerfield takes us on a tour of this astonishing new technolog - general purpose AI - and helps us to understand the issues it raises. You might choose to be alarmed, excited, or indifferent to large language models but you should read Chris’s book before you decide

Mike Woolridge, author of The Road to Conscious Machines

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

With clarity, insight and wit, Summerfield dives beneath the ever-breaking wave of large language models to reveal the deeper principles at play, and the challenges and opportunities that these powerful new technologies present. An essential and highly readable guide to thinking abut how, and weather, computers can think, what's coming next and what we should do about it

Anil Seth, author of Being You

'A closeup look at the large language models that have radically changed computer technology...a clear-minded, accessible examination of how AI systems work'

Kirkus

For readers fascinated by the future of AI, this book is an eye-opening exploration of a revolution unfolding before our eyes

New York Journal of Books
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