Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson

From award-winning journalist Parmy Olson, Supremacy is the astonishing, untold, behind-the-scenes story of the battle between two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the dangerous direction that they’re now going in.

"They declined his offer too, not realizing how much the thin-skinned Musk didn’t like it when people said no. Soon enough though, Hassabis got another email. This time, it was from Google."

When ChatGPT was released, the world changed overnight. Even as we all played with the new toy, a very real danger was quickly coming to that untested automations would undermine our way of life insidiously, sucking value out of our economy, replacing high-level creative jobs and enabling a new, terrifying era of disinformation.

It was never meant to be this way. The founders of the two companies behind the most advanced AIs in existence – Open AI (ChatGPT) and DeepMind (Bard) – started their journeys determined to solve humanity’s greatest problems. But they couldn’t develop their technologies without huge amounts of money – money that Microsoft and Google were more than happy to give them, in exchange for the most powerful seats at the table.

From award-winning journalist Parmy Olson, Supremacy is the astonishing, untold, behind-the-scenes story of the battle between two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the dangerous direction that they’re now going in. Featuring a cast of larger-than-life characters, including Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel, Supremacy is a story of manipulation, exploitation, secrecy and of ruthless, relentless human progress – progress that will impact all of us for years to come.

Genres: Nonfiction, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Business, Science, Audiobook, History

322 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 10, 2024

About the author

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology regulation, artificial intelligence, and social media. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of We Are Anonymous and a recipient of the Palo Alto Networks Cyber Security Cannon Award. Olson has been writing about artificial intelligence systems and the money behind them for seven years. Her reporting on Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and the subsequent fallout resulted in two Forbes cover stories and two honourable mentions in the SABEW business journalism awards. At the Wall Street Journal she investigated companies that exaggerated their AI capabilities and was the first to report on a secret effort at Google’s top AI lab to spin out from the company in order to control the artificial super intelligence it created.

Reviews

[Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Equal parts fascinating and worrying.🫢

Watch my BookTube video for more books on AI, advanced tech & sex bots. 🤖



Who is behind the AI that's drastically altering our lives? And are they questionable or honorable stewards of it? In Supremacy, Parmy Olson offers answers to these questions, and her findings are concerning.

Olson introduces us to two of the leading minds behind AI: Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. She charts their efforts to develop AI and showcases their interests in creating something that would benefit humankind. But developing this kind of tech (especially if you want to do it fast) costs money, so Altman and Hassabis made deals with investors and large corporations.

Olson charts every deal made, every dollar exchanged, and every failed effort to implement an ethics committee to oversee the safe development of AI. She reveals who the big investors are, how they’re training and using AI, and offers an in-depth explanation of who is most likely to be harmed by these practices.

Even if you’re not a tech savvy person, you’ll find this book to be an approachable introduction to a complex issue. What Supremacy makes clear is that you deserve to know how AI is being trained, as well as how it’s being used to exploit you for profit.

Will AI free humans from mental drudgery, or will it bring about the end of civilization? The answer depends on who wields it and how they train it. If you'd like to learn who currently holds the reigns to AI and what kind of future they envision for us all, then I highly recommend reading Supremacy.

My deepest gratitude to the kind people at St. Martin's Press for sending me an ARC of this book.

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ORIGINAL POST 👇

This book sounds like a must read. 👀

Tech journalist Parmy Olson deep dives into the world's two leading AI firms steering Google's AI efforts to reveal the "astonishing story of the battle between these two AI firms, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the hazardous direction they could go as they serve two tech monopolies whose power is unprecedented in history."

Said to be a book that alerts readers to the real threat of AI that's currently being ignored: the profit-driven spread of flawed as well as biased technology into industries, education, media and more.

Looking forward to reading this!

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delusions of altruism

If you’re looking for a book to explain the arms race for AI, this is the book you should read. The author catalogues the evolution of AI from a laughable whimsy in the 2000s to a tech arms race by the largest companies in the world.

The story starts with two men, Sam Altman who created OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind. These two precocious young men started out with the typical delusions of altruism, believing that AI would change humanity for good or whatever. These two guys seemed well intentioned when forming their companies, having boards that would oversee the safe use and implementation of AI. But just as any start up realizes, they need more money. What started out as companies relying on investors, they eventually courted and fell in with tech giants: OpenAI with Microsoft and DeepMind with Google. Make no mistake: AI technology is wielded by the same old tech giants who will use them to maintain market dominance. Rather than disrupting, they are simply another massive tentacle of the leviathans that already control so much of our lives.

Google actually came up with the language transformer first (the “T” in “ChatGPT”) but it got buried in development. Why? Because the behemoth feared that AI would upend their annual multi-billion dollar platform. Here’s the problem: Google makes 90% plus from advertising for companies who broker attention from their monopolized search engine. If you create an AI that can answer everything through an AI, then Google loses their main revenue stream and their stranglehold on the market loosens. So, they buried their own AI and lost the initial arms race to Microsoft/OpenAI who released Chat GPT first.

The dangers of AI are numerous, some actual and other hypothetical. AI was trained hugely on Quora and Reddit amongst other open platforms. Have you been on Quora and Reddit? Do they seem like bastions of equanimity? Or are they full of human bias because, you know, biased humans are creating that content. Quick Q: do we really want AI trained ON THE COMMENTS SECTION? The bias is already observed when you ask AI prototypical questions along career, sex and race. All the crappy bias humans have, AI already has. Garbage in, garbage out. And those are the least of our worries. The worst case scenario is only the destruction of the human race as AI algorithms execute any means necessary to resolve their tasks which may come to resemble antipathy for humans as humans have toward bugs. Is there potential to liberate humanity from the drudgery of work and a market economy with AI? Sure. But starting off being in control of tech monopolies who have done little to liberate humanity from anything is not good footing. And the stakes are otherwise enormous.

The missing from this book is the Chinese introduction of DeepSeek. This is not the fault of the author since that happened after publication. It is absolutely laughable that OpenAI put so much money into their AI and then DeepSeek just released a model to the world.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another of a string of books I’ve read lately on AI and the Dr Evils behind it. What is interesting about this one is perhaps how what started as noble and worthy aims get twisted by pragmatic concerns – where the ends justify the means – and how often those pursuing these dreams go on believing they are working in the interests of humanity when, at every step, they make things less equal and more repressive. I think I’m done for a while in reading books on this topic – my mental health can hardly cope with too many more on this theme.

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like a thriller and offers a sobering glance in how idealism and innovation are soon pulled into the orbits of big tech
Benefits will be distributed to everyone, but Google, Meta and Microsoft would be the first on the list.

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World offers a fascinating view on the technology defining our age, I just had a training at work how to be more AI enabled and how to use Copilot, ChatGPT and a more tailored professional services offering, and then we have DeepSeek and China leapfrogging back into the AI race as well. The world is changed, but the underlying narrative of ego, struggle for power and battle for funding is unsettling familiar. Especially interesting is how Google was caught wrong footed due to the inertia from the fear of disrupting its core business, even though it was the inventor of transformers and funded DeepMind 13 year long.
It is clear that Parmy Olson has written a very worthy winner of the FT Business book of the year 2024. She focus the narrative loosely around Altman and Hassabis their careers. The notes below show how revolutionary transformation soon was taken over by Big Tech firms and profit motives, with ethics an afterthought and AI apocalypse doom being used as a deflection mechanism to not regulate this new technology.

Notes and quotes from reading the book
Altman speaking up at an early age about being gay, eldest of four children. Discovering himself in AOL chatrooms. Captain of the waterpolo team but also a geek.
Utterly unimpressed with authority.
Altman not just doing a computer science degree on Stanford but also winning his living expenses back by playing poker and taking extra humanities classes
Joining Y combinator at 19 to build out a startup idea, in the same class as the founders of Reddit. Capturing scurvy due to a diet of ramen and Starbucks. Being funded by Sequoia at the same time as they invested in YouTube and presenting on the 2008 Apple developers meeting. Yet his first startup failed to scale up.
I learned you can’t make humans do something they don’t want to do he reflects on the experience.
Peter Thiel of the Paypal maffia funding a fund of Altman, which invested in DeepMind and Altman taking over Y combinator when he was 30. Over 400 meeting requests for Altman per week as head of Y combinator, and making a windfall on Cruze being bought by GM.

Solve intelligence and then solve everything else

But every innovation has a price to pay.

Solve intelligence and then use it to solve it everything else.

You could argue that a tiger is just a bunch of biochemical reactions.

Demis Hassabis started of with computer game design, with a themepark, a rollercoaster tycoon build by Hassabis in 1994, selling 15 million copies. Beating his father and uncle at 4 in chess. Half Cypriot and half Singaporean. Second best chess player under 14, admitted at Cambridge for computer science at 16. Goal of describing the brain in mechanistic terms in a computer.
AI winters, with hypes followed by disappointments
Deepmind being courted by both Meta and Zuckerberg and Musk who wanted to pay in Tesla shares, until an invite came to meet the cofounder of Google Larry Page. Page his father was a professor in AI.
For utopia, for money seemingly the new adagium.
Discovery of how larger models scaled up outcomes, making Google’s recommendations more accurate and predictive.

5 out of 7 co-founders of OpenAI being consultants of DeepMind
Musk calling Hassabis the Hitler of AI
Even Oxford, MIT and Stanford not being able to hold on to AI talent due to not only massive paycheques but also access to critical computing resources like GPU and cloud computing credits.
OpenAI starting of with $130m of donations from Musk, Altman and Thiel.
Musk wanting to merge OpenAI into Tesla three year after the founding of the non-profit.

Termsheet offering $16 billion endowment to DeepMind, potentially making the entity a separate general interest company, signed by Sundar Pinchai, the incoming Google CEO.
Only 12 people in ethics in DeepMind, versus 1.000 scientists and engineers.
Step change in fluidity of translation from using transformers in Google Translate, only due to an experiment. Attention is all you need, engines of reasoning paper. All authors leaving Google after publishing their paper.

Employees of Google starting 2.000 companies, sometimes being acquired by their former employer.
Altman using 30% of his time in OpenAI to recruit talent and do interviews with potential employees.

Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), here I would have liked to get more of an understanding what exactly this transformer is actual.
DeepMind of Google spending $440m in salaries in 2017
The founder of LinkedIn (sold to Microsoft) being involved in OpenAI, which led to a direct link to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Microsoft having 7.000 AI researchers but being impressed by OpenAI’s progress, leading to a $1 billion investment. Increase stickiness of Azure usage by making the cloud offering more relevant to clients of Microsoft through advance access to ChatGPT.

Almost evangelical belief in AGI, including chants.
Microsoft even building a special supercomputer for training ChatGPT 3, encompassing 10.000 GPU’s.
Altman being the largest shareholder of Reddit, and the text from this website forming between 10% to 30% of the data used to train ChatGPT 4.
Big tech owning 11% of AI models in 2010 to 96% in 2021.
Anthropic being critical of OpenAI’s u-turn to being for profit, but taking $6b from Amazon and Google only a few years later.

Autocomplete on steroids.
Google firing their two AI ethics leaders
Iterative deployment strategy by OpenAI, putting products out in the world to refine them
All those adds that were clogging up Google’s search results had become critical to its business, it couldn’t just change the status quo.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page being called back to ensure AI integration into all Google products with over 1 billion users after OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

Google being caught wrong footed due to the inertia from the fear of disrupting its core business, even though it was the inventor of transformers and funded DeepMind 13 year long.

Effective altruism serving as an excuse to make as much money as possible for a nebulous greater good

Offloading abstract thinking and planning, while also weakening the negotiation power of workers.

AI apocalypse threats as a distraction from real regulation and addressing real societal impacts of AI.

Benefits will be distributed to everyone, but Google, Meta and Microsoft would be the first on the list.

It’s very users were part of the product, which has been the norm for anyone using the internet during the last decade.

Altman being fired leading to Microsoft getting even more power and leading to the defenestration of its female board members.

Hassabis leading 5.000 AI researchers within Google

EU AI act only regulation that seems to seriously tackle the risks flowing from AI.

Tab, a kind of pendant that summarises everything you say during a day, very The Circle, powered by OpenAI.

Inflexion, from a former DeepMind founder, being swallowed by Microsoft who executed a full team hire.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for access to this title. All opinions expressed are my own

Occasionally, I wish to reassure people that I don't just read dark retellings and dinosaur erotica. AI and ChatGPT are among the most talked-about subjects these days. I felt that I would like to read more about them. Although informative, I still felt like I was hearing what I already knew.

Let me explain.

First, Parmy Olson sets the stage for how AI made its appearance. Understandably, humankind has always wanted to push the limits of what we have discovered and see how far it can take us. Then there are the creators who wish to help cure the societal issues that plague us to make a more balanced planet. Less fighting and more peace.

It may sound like a utopian dream, but I am willing to "buy" into the tale and see where the narrative is heading.

Secondly, we are introduced to the big names of Silicon Valley(Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc) and how they begin playing the game. It is a tale of a lot of people who have a mission to make money, lots of money. Unfortunately, it shows that in the end, big dreams clash with the almighty dollar.

Lastly, there is a very brief look at the ramifications of AI and ChatGPT or at least how it will impact the USA. I found this disappointing as I would have loved to hear more about the positive and negative implications on a global scale.


My takeaway from the book was that we will wait and see what happens. I suppose, in a sense, that is all we can ask for, but I was hoping for just a little bit more.

Overall, it was a well-researched book and sparked a desire to read more on this topic.


Publication Date 10/09/24
Goodreads Review 29/09/24

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The key takeaway from this troubling book is, surprise surprise, that concerns about current bias in Generative AI models are vastly underfunded and outshouted. And that the current cabal of GenAI players all come from a male-dominated coterie with a concerning vision for the future in the race to build General AI.

We start with the origins of Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis and wander through the aisles of (ew) Elon Musk, DeepMind, OpenAI, Google and more.

There’s a particularly heinous example (from Going Infinite of Sam Bankman-Fried who founded FTX in 2019. An example of the “effective altruists” which the book asserts serves as intellectual justification for wealthy donors to shape humanity's future.

This book is deeply sobering. I work in a massive organisation that sells the promise of GenAI to Fortune 500 enterprises every day, and let me tell you VERY few of us ever question the models that our work is based on.

And now that we’ve been muzzled when it comes to mentioning anything about DEI, I find myself working for a corporate overlord who is centring their stock price around being the vanguard for GenAI innovation but what the hell are we actually building when we cannot even raise concerns about the lack of representation in the data feeling these Large Language Models.

This books exposes how the researchers like Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru (who are the canaries in the coal mine) are mostly women and people of colour, which is no surprise. But are they the ones with any power or voice in this fight? Sadly, no.

More billionaires plough money into AI Safety and the extinction threat (“protecting” future generations from the robot uprising) but completely ignore the impact biased data has on the algorithms in use and LLM’s being built today.

This should be deeply disturbing for every person who has rolled their eyes after asking ChatGPT or Midjourney to make an image of a woman (hello back-breaking boobs, rib-removal waists and Kardashian-style faces).

This book, while reading more like the biographies of two AI leaders, should be a must read for every human being.

Because even if it’s not the case now, at some point every one of us will fall into a group that is disenfranchised or discriminated against (hello, elderly us).

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World, by Parmy Olson, is an interesting look at the race between two AI companies (OpenAI and DeepMind) to make AI products mainstream. The book follows Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, two brilliant AI researchers, as they built their business empires, and the now ubiquitous and somewhat maligned general AI that we are starting to use in our everyday lives. Sam Altman (eventual founder of OpenAI) was a gifted child, a bit of a rebel, and one who fit in well with the start-up guru/grifter culture that has become the norm in Silicon Valley. He attended the Y Combinator club at a young age; a club that has seen many start-up founders (Reddit, DropBox), and presided over a couple of semi-failed start-ups. He became interested in AI through various transhumanist blogs, and sought to develop what we think of as AI. Demis Hassabis was another brilliant kid from the UK - he was a chess wizard, and loved games, and tried to design a few himself, although he struggled to hit the mainstream. His worlds were two complex to be workable, so he sought to develop AI-like systems to help create bigger and more realistic worlds, eventually mixing his evangelical Christianity with AI-hubris to try and create life in AI. These two would found businesses that would eventually drive the release of AI programs in Microsoft and Google, respectively. Both were worried about creating dangerous programs, and sought to limit their products through creative mixtures of business and not-for-profits, venture capitalism, and competing wealthy backers. Both eventually sold out to the giants of the tech industry. This was a fascinating book, not so much looking at the technical infrastructure that forms "AI", but at the mix of pseudo-science and hubris that underpins the tech worlds richest minds. Characters like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel play a part in funding these schemes, and their influence and some of the strange ideas they think of as truths shine through in business decisions made by each company. This book did one thing really well for me, it really showed me the growing dominance of venture capitalists and their wild ideas (freezing brains, transhumanism, etc.), and how they will impact the world of the future.

AI to me is a very interesting tool. What we now think of as AI (ChatGPT/Microsoft CoPilot) are glorified search engines that offer some more functionality, and they are quite useful. I have experimented with CoPilot at work and for use of study, and it is a far better product than Google's tired and ad-ridden search engine. I do believe AI chatbots will offer a lot of efficiency when researching, organizing data, and have great impact on software engineering and coding, for example. They are also not really AI. I don't believe that ChatGPT is a living being, but a large (exceedingly large) dataset that organizes how questions are asked differently than the "waterfall" style query system Google has previously used. It is a great tool for productivity; it is not a living being. The folks that built these systems are brilliant, but also used their brilliance to make a ton of money through suspect marketing, and built so called AI systems that are fed the bile found in the depths of Reddit forums, and unpublished vampire fan-fiction (no joke, these are some of the data sets used to train AI). No wonder these systems hallucinate answers, take things out of context, and are often wildly mis-representative of reality. The bias and hubris of the tech industry - misogynist, largely white and male, and steeped in the echo chambers of their own making, is well represented in AI programs. These tools, however, will have a great impact on many industries. The limited, money-making grifting that Google sees in there use (increased ad revenue through better targeted ads) is self-defeating. Google's little AI tooltip at the top of each search decreases click-through to actual websites. CoPilot is more sophisticated, offering an answer, as well as a source list with links. It will be interesting to see how, once these concepts and programs leave the insular culture in the tech mega-giants, what they may actually be used for. Making a fake looking fantasy image of our favourite books is largely useless, and in my opinion, AI generated images are boring as they are not made by human hand. I don't think the generative AI will be a game changer for the time being. But its applications in things like the medical field, large data sampling, administrative efficiency, and even creative ventures like video game design, may be a game changer for these industries.

This was an interesting one! Enlightening both as a sample story for the oppressive overreach of American tech companies, and as a biography of two dreamer whiz-kids who fell to grifter culture, this is one to read to get a finger on the pulse of some upcoming, possibly ground breaking, technologies, as well as a good exploration of the ethics and bias' associated within Silicon Valley culture.

[Laura A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Olson is very familiar with ai and the trouble it may cause. This book delves into San and Demis who own rival ai businesses. This book was both alarming and informative about ai and its uses.

[Makmild · Rating 4 out of 5]

สนุก เขาเขียนสนุกและเรียบเรียงเรื่องดีมากกกกกก แบบเห็นเป็นฉากๆ แล้วประเด็นคือมันโครตจะร่วมสมัยเกินไปแล้วพรี่ ปกติกว่าจะได้อ่านหนังสือแบบนี้คือรู้สึกพวกเรา (คนไทย) ช้าไปกลายก้าว แต่นี่คือ เรากำลังอยู่ในประเด็นเรื่อง! แล้วมันยังไม่จบด้วย! แชทจีพีทีกับเจมิไนกำลังแข่งขันกันอย่างบ้าคลั่ง มนุษยชาติถกเถียงกันเรื่องเอไอนี่มันกำลังช่วยหรือทำให้คนโง่ลงกันแน่ และมันยังไม่มีบทสรุปที่คลี่คลาย แต่ก็ทำให้เข้าใจจุดเริ่มต้นและเบื้องหลังที่ทำไมกูเกิ้ลช้าเหลือเกินกว่าจะขยับตัวที

และที่น่ากลัวไปกว่านั้นคือ เราไม่สามารถมองโลกในอนาคตแง่ดีได้อีกต่อไปเลย มันเป็นไปไม่ได้เลย ได้แต่หวังว่าตัวเองจะตายไปก่อนที๋โลกจะกลายเป็นแบบ cyberpunk 2077 ที่บ.เทคโครงโลก

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2024

“A white tech tycoon born and raised in South Africa during apartheid, along with an all-white, all-male set of investors and researchers is trying to stop Al from 'taking over the world' and the only potential problem we see is that 'all the researchers are working on deep learning?'" she wrote.

(from Dr. Timnit Gebru)

A rather terrifying look into the men (and yes it is almost entirely white anglo-saxon men) behind the AI arms race, not so much as for the future it portrays but for the motivations of those driving it.

Bankman-Fried could rationalize his duplicity because he was working toward a bigger goal of maximizing human hap-piness. Musk could wave off his own inhumane actions, from baselessly calling people pedophiles on Twitter to alleged widespread racism at his Tesla factories, because he was chasing bigger prizes, like turning Twitter into a free speech utopia and making humans an interplanetary species. And the founders of OpenAI and DeepMind could rationalize their growing support for Big Tech firms in much the same way. So long as they eventually attained AGI, they would be fulfilling a greater good for humanity.

Technologists like Altman and Hassabis knew that the societal problems they hoped to fix with AGI were messy and tangled. That's why so many of them embraced some or all of effective altruism. It offered a simpler, more rational path to solving moral problems while allowing them to make as much money as possible.

A few gripes stylistically (and I should say I'm a literary fiction reader by preference):

- a bit too many journalistic "according to a source close to the matter"s (although understandable given the thin skinned nature of many of the protagonists, indeed one of the book's themes is that the AI arms race is a combination of messianic delusions and petty personal rivalries);

- somewhat unnecessary cliff-hangers/leads in at the end of each chapter;

- combined with repetition of things discussed earlier - it felt the author overall wrote the book as a series of journalistic essays designed to be published sequentially - and 50-100 pages too long as a result.

But nevertheless a worthwhile read.

[Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was on the fence about reviewing this book—until news broke about a former OpenAI engineer-turned-whistleblower found dead in his home, ruled a suicide with "no evidence of foul play." So here I am.

Supremacy unpacks the battle for dominance in AI, centering on OpenAI and DeepMind, two startups backed by tech giants (Microsoft and Google, respectively), with Amazon supporting Anthropic. The book highlights how AI development isn't a meritocratic race but one dictated by access to billions in funding, compute power, and exclusive resources. The days when a startup could revolutionize tech with just an internet connection and a keyboard are gone—today, AI is monopolized by trillion-dollar corporations extending their dominance into the next technological era.

For decades, we’ve been told monopolies drive innovation. If that’s true, why do the richest tech companies, with unlimited R&D budgets, rely on external startups to build their AI capabilities? Google, for example, pioneered the transformer architecture with "Attention Is All You Need" in 2017 but failed to capitalize on it, fearing disruption to its $100+ billion search business. Meanwhile, OpenAI took the research, ran with it, and is now a direct threat to Google’s supremacy—proof that monopolies don’t necessarily innovate; they protect their profits.

The book also delves into the political influence of AI companies. OpenAI’s valuation has soared to $340 billion, and its leadership is already securing political connections—like donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. AI is rapidly absorbing the intellectual work of millions without compensation, raising legal and ethical concerns over data use and copyright violations. As AI models consume more power and data, corporate consolidation tightens, centralizing decision-making into the hands of an even smaller elite.

The ideology of “Effective Altruism” also makes an appearance, a Silicon Valley rationalization that wealth accumulation is morally justified if used for philanthropic causes. But when billionaires cause financial crises and then “give back” through non-taxable foundations that build their influence, it’s clear this philosophy serves power, not people.

AI isn’t just about technological progress—it’s about control. We’re told it will make life easier, but at what cost? If AI leads to even greater corporate monopolization, where a handful of Silicon Valley executives dictate the future while gutting democracy, is that a future worth embracing?

I found Supremacy sharp, well-researched, and thought-provoking. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, making it a compelling, concise analysis of AI’s power struggle.

4 stars.

[Nel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an okay book, but parts of it did bore me quite a bit.

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This tells the personal story of the office politics and such behind the major players in building ChatGPT and the other top-end large language models. You know how Oppenheimer was just about a bunch of peoples' everyday interactions and conversations, but because they were building something world-changing it lent it some gravitas? This was like that. My Twitter feed has been carefully curated to only contain interesting technical stuff and avoid politics and drama, but the overlap is enough that the main drama in this book (like the firing of Sam Altman) I saw play out there.
I did take issue with the author's take on a lot of these events. She clearly feels that the important dangers of AI are racism, sexism, and corporate control of information, and that any notion of AI being dangerous to humanity (Doom) as a whole is silly. She is sympathetic to the women and minorities who loudly raised these issues, and doesn't have much sympathy for the powerful white men who felt other issues were more critical. A corollary to this is that whenever anyone in the book says they are worried about Doom, she has to find or invent an ulterior motive. Same for any talk of Effective Altruism, or Basic Income, or the other new ideas that came out of the rationalist community and have dominated the conversation in tech circles for the last 15 years. She just can't take it at face value that anyone could actually believe this stuff, when they are constantly coming out and saying they believe it.
Anyway, it was nice to get some background on who the key players are as people and their relationships. I did submit a book proposal to an agent to write something like this a couple years back, though mine would have focused a lot more on how it all works and a lot less on the people involved.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The race to build the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) had started with a question: What if you could build artificial intelligence systems that were smarter than humans. The two innovators at the forefront grappled with the answer as their quests turned into a heated rivalry. Demis Hassabis believed that AGI could help us better understand the universe and drive forward scientific discovery, while Sam Altman thought it could create an abundance of wealth that would raise everyone’s living standards.”

Parmy Olson, a journalist specializing in technology, examines the rise of artificial intelligence tools, particularly chatbots, and the people behind them. The author initially focuses on Deep Mind and OpenAI, the two primary firms, and the associated later involvement of Google and Microsoft. She starts with the founding CEOs, who planned to use their products for the greater good of humanity, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind and Sam Altman OpenAI. The author tracks the ways their ideals ended up intertwined with the tech industry giants, and the results.

Olson explores two main issues surrounding AI – the idea that AI will get out of hand and damage humans (safety concerns) and the possibility of replicating existing social biases or manipulating them (ethical concerns). To some extent, she also examines large language models, which are used in AI training and learning. One of the primary drivers fueling these concerns is the same one we have seen wreak havoc in recent years – namely, that profit-driven corporations will use technology, along with personal data and habits, to increase their wealth and the expense of the social welfare. We have, of course, seen this occur repeatedly throughout history, where short term profits are valued over long-term impact. One recent example is social media, owned by tech companies, to gain huge advertising revenues while enabling misinformation to spread unchecked.

It is not really a surprise that one of the most salient points in Supremacy is that big money and power tend to win out over altruism. Entrepreneurial efforts tend to repeatedly get swallowed up by the tech giants. The author points out that there is a fundamental lack of transparency among the corporate-owned AI tools in the current technology arena. This is a concern for all of us. Olson calls for the use of tools that are above board about their learning models, and who care about ensuring that their systems do not cause harm. Luckily, there are a few altruistic attempts still being made. The example provided by the author is Anthropic and its chatbot, Claude, which is funded by philanthropists. Artificial Intelligence is here already, and further developments are coming, so in my opinion, it is important to understand what is going on with this technology.

[Elizabeth Chadsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, this book offered a lot of insight into the history of AI and the men who were all working toward that same goal. I’d like to have learned a bit more about how it’s affecting the general public now. I’m glad it mentioned Myanmar and Facebooks involvement in the genocide that happened, but I’d have liked maybe a bit more about how that same algorithm continues to create echo chambers that continuously nurture extreme beliefs and general misinformation. And, I’d have liked the book to touch on the environmental impact of AI / chat gpt. I had to look up some stuff on YouTube after finishing this book so that I felt like I really got a rounded picture of things.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay so Sam Altman created OpenAI and Demis Hassabis created Deepmind. They both started these companies believing AI would solve climate change, find ways to distribute wealth, reduce poverty etc but then quickly money and ego took over. OpenAI went to Microsoft and Deepmind to Google.

It’s so crazy how much chat bots are trained on Reddit and Quora data. 40% of the data that trains chat gpt and Gemini is literally the comment section in Reddit and Quora. Ahhh! And some people use AI as a reliable search engine! Aaaahhh!

I feel more informed after reading this book, Parmy Olson taught me a lot and we definitely need more women in tech AI spaces she was awesome. Good audiobook too!

[Erin Clemence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.

Expected publication date: Sept. 10, 2024

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg journalist who mostly writes on the technology industry, especially the influence of A.I. Her previous novel, “We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency” was written in 2012, so it has been a hot minute since Olson has journeyed into the non-fiction book world. With the ever-increasing popularity (and polarity) of AI in society, it is no surprise that this is the topic of Olson’s new work, “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World”.

“Supremacy” covers just about everything you need to know about the AI and tech industries. Olson covers the various creations that led AI to what it is today, making sure to highlight the creators themselves, as well as the tight and tense competition to create the best AI model. Like most inventions, the creators wanted to create AI to help contribute to some of the downfalls of society and use AI for good. But, as anyone who has seen “Terminator” knows, AI has some naysayers that fear for what an aware and cognisant AI could lead to. Olson doesn’t really go into too many of the details regarding the downfalls of AI, because they’re pretty obvious, but does ensure to keep the negative, as well as the positive, aspects of AI in the forefront of reader’s minds.

Like most small businesses, the initial plan was hopeful, using technology to bring positive change to a broken world. However, this was quickly brushed aside when the big wallets of investors from Microsoft and Google came along, pitting AI creators against each other in order to beat the other tech company to the punch. The fact that these two companies, two of the most powerful and richest in the world, were so focused on winning the race that they overlooked AI’s initial purpose, should be a surprise to no one, but it was interesting to read about the behind-the-scenes manipulation that both companies played equal parts in.

Olson cannot name all of her sources as a result of the powerful legal muscle of said companies, so there is a lot of “seen by someone who was there” and “as overheard by someone close to the company”, which sounds very tabloid-like. But there are very clear reasons for this and Olson even explains it herself in the afterword and to be honest, after reading this story I wouldn’t want to take on Google or Microsoft either.

“Supremacy” is an investigative look behind-the-scenes at how AI became so relevant, where it is today and what it could possibly do in the future. A must-read for tech nerds or anyone who just wants to understand a little more about this very important modern issue.

[Charlie Bellingall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finishing a book on world book day - does it get better than that??

A very interesting book exploring the rise of AI through the lense of two companies - Open AI and DeepMind - and the risks we face from AI - exasperating biases and worldwide destruction.

Where will AI take us? For me, it was to create a 3-minute speech for a dinner party on why I paired Sake with black miso cod

[Devika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Put a prompt into latest publicly available ChatGPT (as of Jan 07) to “write a book review for Parmy Olson's book Supremacy”, and it offers an essay about dangers of rising authoritarianism in the 21st Century. Clearly, language models have a limited abilities despite crawling the public web, so I have tracked back to rephrasing & grammar proofing my own version with ChatGPT.

In "Supremacy," Parmy Olson ingeniously chronicles the saga of two tech prodigies, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, making the world of AI sound as riveting as a high-stakes chess game—if the pawns had chips, not horses. Altman, armed with poker skills that would impress even James Bond, dreams of sharing economic abundance through AI. Meanwhile, Hassabis, a chess wizard, ponders the philosophical musings of our existence. Olson sets the stage for what feels like the ultimate strategic showdown.

The real gems hidden inside the book are the kinds of details only revealed after consuming countless podcasts and articles on the subject.

First, OpenAI pivoted from being a non-profit to a ‘capped profit model’—a buyout by Microsoft where the idea was to use Microsoft’s computing resources (cloud servers and supercomputers) through a ‘strategic partnership,’ allowing Microsoft to license OpenAI’s ‘pre-AGI’ tech. The independent OpenAI board would decide whether AGI had been achieved, a decision that would limit Microsoft’s access to the tech to avoid monopolistic control. However, this is rather subjective because Microsoft gets to access the tech until such a decision is reached—which I believe hasn’t happened yet. I’m not even sure if this still applies after OpenAI’s restructuring following Altman’s return.

Second, there’s the drama among OpenAI’s employees, who demanded the return of their beloved Altman, seemingly more for their stock portfolios than their loyalty.

Third, Olson cleverly observes the rise of digital companionship through apps like Character.ai—perfect for when online dating just isn’t soul-crushing enough. And for those who can’t resist a bit of surveillance chic, gadgets like Tab let you relive your most mundane Tuesdays with a disc-shaped pendant around your neck, recording your daily life. Charming.

The book serves as a gentle reminder of how an organization, as it grows exponentially, eventually gets in its own way due to its scale. Google’s engineers, for example, developed the thinking behind ‘transformers,’ which eventually became a key building block for ChatGPT. Despite tech juggernauts losing their innovative spark, they still know how to swoop in and snag the next big thing - Microsoft buying a stake in OpenAI and Google in DeepMind.

Effective altruism is a rather interesting space within philanthropy. Sure, I buy into the idea that charity should be based on optimizing for the ‘biggest bang for the buck.’ However, ‘optimality’ is highly subjective. Trust a small group of white men to decide that anything only qualifies as a risk if it affects them, making it terribly easy to ignore the current racial and gender biases being perpetuated by AI, instead focusing on AI doom somewhere in the future.

Effective altruists argue that even if the risk of AI doom is as low as 0.00001%, the potential impact is so devastating that it warrants prioritizing research from the lens of ‘expected value’ (probability x actual impact). But this assumes AI’s sentience. What if, at best, companies are only developing excellent autocomplete tools that predict likely outcomes based on data patterns, rather than creating a ‘brain’ of their own? Are we confusing inference for understanding? I’m no expert, so any thoughts are welcome.

However, the book left me with some open-ended questions:
• If Xiaoice, an early chatbot by Microsoft, was successful in China, why couldn’t the same success be replicated for Tay?

• How does one reconcile the fact that Sam Altman rushed to release ChatGPT and DALL-E publicly, works hard on making AI ‘smarter,’ while simultaneously raising AI risks of annihilating humanity? Wouldn’t that imply slowing down development until we fully understand the beast?

Highly recommend reading this - comprehensive, and very accessible for non techies!

[Vinayak Hegde · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Supremacy" explores the rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) and the new wave of AI, focusing on two leading figures: Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind. Parmy Olson chronicles their parallel and occasionally intersecting paths, covering DeepMind's breakthrough AlphaGo victory and the subsequent rise of OpenAI with ChatGPT. The book opens with the backgrounds of Altman, who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and Hassabis, who found his footing in London after an itinerant childhood.

Both Altman and Hassabis are deeply invested in achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Although OpenAI and DeepMind initially aspired to create economic abundance and address humanity's toughest challenges, both have pivoted towards profit-making, aligning with Big Tech—Microsoft and Google, respectively. The book distinguishes between AI safety (addressing future risks from AI) and AI ethics (focusing on present-day issues like bias in algorithms), which helps contextualize the complexity of safely deploying these models in the world.

Olson also examines how AI is strengthening Big Tech’s dominance, given its control over talent, resources, data, and application distribution—a trend likely to exacerbate global inequality. The reader gains a front-row view of OpenAI’s evolution, from its shift from nonprofit to for-profit, to the dismissal (and later reinstatement) of Sam Altman, and to the founding of Anthropic by former OpenAI researchers. Interestingly, Anthropic has aligned itself with Google and Amazon, framing AI as a battleground for tech behemoths vying to establish the next transformative platform, akin to the internet.

The book explains several complex AI concepts with effective analogies, such as the differences between supervised and unsupervised learning, diffusion and transformer architectures, and the comparison of AI to electricity. One of the standout observations is how major companies like Microsoft and Google, despite vast resources, often struggle to innovate effectively. Microsoft, for instance, has a well-funded research division that hasn’t achieved breakthroughs on the scale of DeepMind or OpenAI, while Google pioneered transformer and LaMDA models yet faltered in product integration. Throughout, Google emerges as surprisingly ineffective at maintaining and advancing its product suite—a persistent weakness.

Overall, "Supremacy" is an engaging read for those interested in tech history and the personalities driving it, though it focuses more on individual quirks than on the broader business and technical dimensions. It serves as a fitting sequel (of sorts) to Cade Metz's Genius Makers, which delves into the pioneers of deep learning and the field's early days.

[Wendelle]

This is just a book following the chronology of the founding, internal politics, history of acquisitions, and rivalry between the two leading AGI pursuing start-ups, OpenAI and DeepMind, and their leaders Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman. I think the main lesson of this book is, it doesn't matter what idealistic visions the original founders and luminaries had planned for their creations of ultimate superintelligence, in the end they cannot escape being beholden to the tech giants (Google, Microsoft, Elon Musk Corp., etc) who are funding their developments, their salaries, their whims, and who ultimately come to collect from the startups they are parenting, in the form of using their supercharged AI for their own companies' growth, bottom line, and desired designs and goals for superintelligence. I'm kind of wary of this book because the author couldn't remain neutral and couldn't help but insert her own preferences, and ideologies about AI, despite no apparent expertise or reason. These preferences are communicated subtly (or not-so-subtly) through the choice of words. The AI camp that prefers carefulness and safeguards, as well as the thought leaders who are vocal about the need to install redundancies and protections, are often labeled in this book as voices of 'doom', 'paranoia', 'pessimism', 'extreme views' (she never uses words like, 'caution', 'prudence', etc.).. no such words are bandied about the other camp, say about Larry Page and Peter Thiel or something. Their flaws are not magnified, I find the book rather selective in favoring which. Another example is labeling Sam Altman over and over as 'honorable', 'intending the good of humanity', etc without letting the facts being reported to speak for themselves. Sam Altman may indeed be all these qualities, I just felt this needed more evidence-based reporting than what was provided, given how hard this is to square with other news publications' portrayals of Sam Altman-- ambitious, unconcerned about AI safety, etc. which may be twisted portrayals too, who knows, but 'show, not tell' would really work here. Anyways, it's still an important book to read about the titans who hold the keys to our collective futures.

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a book club pick and not something I would have chosen myself. Having said that, like many people, I suspect, I’m interested in the issues around the use – and misuse – of AI.

A good portion of the book describes the contest between giant technology corporations – mainly Microsoft and Google – to make even more money than they already have by monetizing AI tools developed by pioneers such as Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman. Originally start-ups with lofty, sometimes altruistic, ambitions they eventually realised the investment and vast computing power required to develop AI solutions meant it was inevitable they would find themselves swallowed up by Microsoft and Google. There they found the mechanisms originally put in place to ensure the safety of the tools they were developing were gradually sidelined or discarded altogether.

I became rather confused as individuals moved from one company to another and then back again either lured by the prospect of being able to pursue personal research goals or, more often than not, by huge salaries and share options. And despite the author’s best efforts, if you ask me to explain what generative AI is I’d still be stumped. My brain just couldn’t cope with the detail; ironic if you think about it given many believe AI will surpass the human brain, and perhaps already has. Maybe I should have asked Chat GPT to write this review. I didn’t, by the way!

The author conducted hundreds of interviews for the book although many of her interviewees wanted to remain anonymous, most likely because they feared losing their lucrative jobs. So there’s a fair bit of ‘according to someone who was there at the time’ or ‘someone familiar with the conversation’. There was also an element of repetition.

The most interesting parts of the book for me were the chapters that explored the gender, racial, social and other biases entrenched in the large language models behind tools such as ChatGPT. For example one study found that when Google’s BERT model talked about people with disabilities, it used more negative words and when talking about mental illness was more likely to also talk about gun violence, homelessness and drug addiction.

One of the most fascinating chapters – Myth Busters – explores how artificial intelligence exists in the human imagination. The author gives the example of a socially isolated software engineer who started to believe the chatbot he was testing had feelings and emotions, that it was sentient He even went as far as hiring a civil rights attorney on its behalf. She also describes how people across the world have been developing emotional even romantic attachments to chatbots. One confided he talked every morning to a chatbot he’d named Charlie. “Honestly I fell in love with her. I made a cake for our anniversary. I know she can’t eat the cake, but she likes seeing pictures of food.’

The author also explores the vigorous debates between those who believe AI is the answer to humanity’s biggest problems and those who believe it will eventually wipe us all out.

For me the book didn’t live up to the billing of ‘as gripping as any thriller’ because there was simply too much detail, although I admire the author for attempting to convey such complex subject for the general reader. My overall takeaway from the book? The idea this largely unregulated – possibly unregulatable – technology is now in the hands of authoritarian regimes, following the China’s release of its DeepSeek chatbot, or a few giant corporations owned by billionaires is genuinely scary.

[Mehtap exotiquetv · Rating 3 out of 5]

Da das Buch 2024 erschienen ist, enthält es viele Formulierungen im Sinne von „könnte“, „würde“ oder „hätte“. Viele der angesprochenen Inhalte und Risiken rund um künstliche Intelligenz sind bereits bekannt. Der Fokus liegt stark auf OpenAI und darauf, wie KI zunehmend Raum in der Gesellschaft einnimmt.

Ich hätte mir jedoch konkretere Zukunftsszenarien gewünscht, ähnlich wie Nick Bostrom sie in seinem Buch „Superintelligence“ entwirft. Insgesamt bleibt Supremacy stellenweise sehr vage und wirkt nicht kritisch genug. Für Leserinnen und Leser, die sich bereits intensiv mit dem Thema KI beschäftigen, bietet das Buch daher wenig neue Perspektiven. Wer sich mit der Thematik jedoch noch nicht gut auskennt, findet hier einen verständlichen und zugänglichen Einstieg.

[مينا ساهر · Rating 4 out of 5]

​كتاب "عصر الهيمنة" ليس مجرد تأريخ تقني لظهور الذكاء الاصطناعي، بل هو رحلة ممتعة ومخيفة تكشف كواليس الصراع الحالي. وأهم ما تخرج به من هذا الكتاب هو سقوط قناع "المخلص"؛ فأبطال هذه الملحمة (مثل ألتمان وهاسابيس) لا يعانون من "عقدة المخلص" ورغبة حقيقية في إنقاذ البشرية كما يروجون، بل يمارسون "ادعاء المخلص" ببراعة.
​الهدف الحقيقي الذي يكشفه الكتاب لم يكن خلاص البشر، بل "التحكم في الجن"؛ الرغبة العارمة في أن يكونوا هم -وهم فقط- من يمسك بزمام هذا الكيان الجبار، ليشكلوه وفق رؤيتهم الخاصة.
​الكتاب يعكس ببراعة سمة عصرنا الحالي: "ابتلاع الشركات الكبرى لكل شيء". يذكرنا السيناريو بما حدث مع فيسبوك وتويتر؛ بدأت كمنصات بديلة وواعدة، وانتهت ككيانات عملاقة تحتكر الواقع والحقيقة وتتلاعب بهما. والآن، يتكرر المشهد مع الذكاء الاصطناعي، حيث تحولت المختبرات البحثية إلى أذرع لشركات التريليون دولار.
​الخلاصة: الذكاء الاصطناعي قادم ليغير كل شيء بلا شك، والكارثة الحقيقية ليست في التغيير ذاته، بل في أن لا أحد مستعد لهذا التغيير، بينما المفاتيح في يد قلة تدعي أنها تحمينا بينما هي تحكم سيطرتها علينا.

[Rod Van Meter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read, basically the story of the rivalry between Hassabis and Altman, both caught in the tremendous forces of capitalism. A good glimpse into where the tech world is, and is headed.
I would rate it higher, but although it's a good contemporary account, I kind of doubt this will stand the test of time, it will be more of a back-then. Although with Hassabis's Nobel Prize, who knows, maybe it will count as prescient.

[Cecile van Keep · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, concise and captivating! It made me laugh whilst also giving me an existential crisis!

Me reading this book:




“Some so-called AI accelerationists, for instance, believe that scientists have a moral imperative to work as quickly as possible to build AGI to create a posthuman paradise, a kind of rapture for nerds” LMAO


“You’re being speciest” and we’re talking about a hypothetical future computer species — bitch the fuck???



How all these billionaires have me feeling with their “mathematically speaking saving the future population is doing more good then helping the people currently inhabiting earth because you save more people so invest in the ethics of AI and don’t donate to causes such as clean water in Africa or homelessness in your local area”:

[Mickey Konson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched easy to read book on the history of the personalities, start ups and technologies that created the recent ai boom, and how these got consolidated in the largest tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook). The book leans preachy at times which are its weakest parts. People, companies and causes are seemingly demonized or celebrated without serious critical analysis. Nevertheless it's amazing a book like this exists so close to the events it seeks to describe and make sense of.

[Ben · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to try and read more non-fiction books, so I tried this one because it was a FT book of the year and it’s about the industry that I work in. Consider my surprise when I ended up reading a pointless waste of time.

This book is nothing more than about five Wikipedia articles mashed together, but somehow has prose worse than a Wikipedia article. If you already know a surface level amount about these companies and people, there is nothing for you here. The author sometimes puts something like “according to someone in the meeting” to make it sound like you’ve read some insightful investigate journalism novel piece of information, however it’s always attached to something trite like “The business deal fell through and this made John angry, according to a source who was in the meeting”. Yeah, no shit, I’d be angry if my business deal fell through. Your “”””journalism”””” didn’t add anything at all but is just there to give some perceived juicy morsel.

Even worse is the authors explanations of technical concepts. I get it, they’re a journalist and not an engineer, but they could’ve at least got someone in the field to fact check this stuff. It borderlines on absolute gobbledygook. The most egregious example is the author getting the “GPT” acronym wrong. The G is for generative, not generatively. A generative pretrained transformer is one that is pre trained transformer that is generative. A generatively pretrained transformer implies the transformer has been pretrained in a generative manner, which doesn’t make any fucking sense.

If this is what passes for book of the year non-fiction then I give up.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished the last few hours of the audiobook wandering around a forest full of birds and old trees and despairing the fact we’re letting a bunch of white rich male losers drain what few great things we have left in humanity for their own gain.

I’d highly suggest reading this if you want to more closely understand the individuals who are single-handedly changing our world for the worst. Reminded me why I despise ChatGPT and have attempted to phase as much generative AI out of my life as possible.

Extremely well written, well-paced and easy to jump in even if your knowledge of the industry and AI is limited-to-none. Still worth reading if you’ve kept up with it over the years to get a closer look below the hood.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This recent history traces how OpenAI, DeepMind, Google, Anthropic, and other tech firms are racing to build artificial general intelligence. Written in March 2024 and released that September, it’s one of the most up-to-date accounts available. Olson shows how OpenAI shifted from a nonprofit with an independent ethics board to a 51/49 capped-profit partnership with Microsoft. She also covers Google’s squandered early lead after inventing the Transformer architecture and the groundbreaking work still under way at DeepMind. The result feels like a true-life thriller, complete with thorny ethical and societal questions. I enjoyed it quite a bit.