Supremacy

The story of modern AI is inseparable from the story of a small number of people and organizations who pursued it when most of the world wasn’t paying attention, and Supremacy narrows in on two of the most consequential: DeepMind and OpenAI. Parmy Olson, who has spent years reporting on AI and technology for Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, traces the parallel rise of these two organizations — their founding visions, their internal cultures, the outsized personalities driving them, and the growing tension between the collaborative ideals many of their founders started with and the competitive commercial realities that have increasingly defined their trajectories. The book is at its best as a character study, bringing to life the researchers, executives, and funders whose decisions have done more to shape the current AI landscape than almost anyone outside these two institutions. Olson has genuine access and a reporter’s instinct for the revealing detail, which gives Supremacy a texture that distinguishes it from broader AI overviews — this is less interested in explaining how the technology works than in explaining how the human drama behind it has unfolded. At 336 pages, the book moves at a journalist’s pace, prioritizing narrative momentum over encyclopedic coverage, and the result is one of the more gripping insider accounts of how the AI race actually developed.

Author:
Parmy Olson