A new book chronicles the battle over AI, but fails to question whether AI is worth battling over

Book Reviews Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World By Parmy Olson St. Martin’s Press” 336 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. For much of her book, Olson seems overly captivated by the potential of AI; in her prologue, she writes of never having seen a field “move as quickly as artificial intelligence has in just the last two years.” According to her bio, however, she has been covering technology for “more than 13 years.” That may not have been enough to give her the historical perspective needed to assess the situation. “One of the most powerful features of artificial intelligence isn’t so much what it can do,” she writes, “but how it exists in the human imagination.” The public, goaded by AI entrepreneurs, may be fooled into thinking that a bot is “a new, living being.” Yet as Olson reports, the researchers themselves are aware that large language models — the systems that appear to be truly intelligent — have been “trained on so much text that they could infer the likelihood of one word or phrase following another.. These giant prediction machines, or as some researchers described, ‘autocomplete on steroids.’” AI entrepreneurs such as Altman and Musk have warned that the very products they are marketing may threaten human civilization in the future, but such warnings, drawn largely from science fiction, are really meant to distract us from the commercial threats nearer at hand: the infringement of creative copyrights by AI developers training their chatbots on published works, for example, and the tendency of bots flummoxed by a question to simply make up an answer. Olson concludes “Supremacy” by quite properly asking whether Hassabis and Altman, and Google and Microsoft, deserve our “trust” as they “build our AI future.” By way of an answer, she asserts that what they have built already is “some of the most transformative technology we have ever seen.” But that’s not the first time such a presumptuous claim has been made for AI, or indeed for many other technologies that ultimately fell by the wayside.