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How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
by Christopher Summerfield
An insider look at the Large Language Models (LLMs) that are revolutionizing our relationship to technology, exploring their surprising history, what they can and should do for us today, and where they will go in the future—from an AI pioneer and neuroscientist.
In this accessible, up-to-date, and authoritative examination of the world's most radical technology, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explores what it really takes to build a brain from scratch. We have entered a world in which 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. But 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?
These Strange New Minds charts the evolution of intelligent talking machines and provides us with the tools to understand how they work and how we can use them. 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?
"Provocative…Summerfield brings some welcome nuance and clarity to discussions of LLMs. In a crowded field of AI primers, this rises to the top." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A clear-minded, accessible examination of how AI systems work." —Kirkus Reviews
"A key addition to collections, this is more than just another tech book: it's a guide to navigating the era of AI with awareness, and the writing encourages readers to think critically about how humans interact with the technology." —Library Journal
"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, coauthor of The Coming Wave
"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
This information about These Strange New Minds was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christopher Summerfield has one foot in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience – studying the brains of humans, as Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford – and the other in AI research, helping build intelligent systems as a Staff Research Scientist at the pioneering Google DeepMind. He has won several awards, including the prestigious Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award in 2015. He is regularly invited to give keynote talks across the world. Christopher has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and book chapters and his academic book, Natural Genera lIntelligence: How Understanding the Brain Can Help Us Build AI, was widely acclaimed. This is his first book for a general readership.
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