Supremacy - Book review

Parmy Olson - as a well respected voice on tech – takes a long hard look at the competitive landscape of the new AI movement in the world. This is of course before Deepseek and the ‘Six Little Dragons’  - arguably with the potential to disrupt the current one - showed up. But till the time of writing of the book she covers, in good depth, the landscape of how the AI bellwethers evolved in the US (and the UK).

She starts bottom-up on the current picture, which eventually – like everything tech – rolls into the current titans, principally Google and Microsoft. The key AI initiatives supported by each one is – respectively – Deep Mind and OpenAI. There are other investments as well of these tech titans (and others like Meta and Amazon) into companies such as Perplexity and Anthropic, and not to forget Grok by Elon Musk, but principally what is described is the birth of Deep Mind and Open AI, following the lives of their founders, Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman respectively.

While we see a small peek into their personal lives growing up – big talents that they are – Hassabis in Chess and Altman in Poker - the key takeaway from the book is how the rise of AI, and the companies founded, was driven by altruistic instincts and the idea to prevent AI from getting too big / harmful to the human race. And now, once grown up, how the idea has been overrun by commercial concerns of the investors, with profit-making (as an objective to raise funds) now forcing AI and their founders to lose independence – of their intent to keep AI safe. 

While DeepMind was busy winning Chess / Go games globally and Google kept its research on large language models and language translator under wraps until it was too late (we only heard of Lamda going sentient - as described in delicious details), ChatGPT stole a march in first introducing the models to the world (with questionable disclosures on data sourcing) - while growing further and further apart from Elon - one of its earliest investors - on its motives of profit making - which was necessitated by the constant need to raise money, which, I guess, does make the world go round. 

Notably, the book introduces another camp – now fired from Google – that advocated for AI safety and less biasness (comprising Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru) and their very well known work/ paper: On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.