AI seems to be everywhere at the moment. The media machine and the echo chamber of social media algorithms have bathed my feeds in news, white papers, and academic articles about the latest digital revolution. I have to admit here that before reading Supremacy, my knowledge of AI and the large language models that drove the algorithms and machine learning behind them was a bit of a foreign concept.

Although Supremacy sets out a history of just two AI companies (ChatGPT and DeepMind) and the personalities that shaped and invested in them and subsequently bought them, Parmy Olson does a great job of explaining throughout what drives AI tools—at least the ones that are competing head-on with search engines.

If you want a history of AI and a glance at the potential future, this is a great book to start with. It is surprisingly entertaining and deeply fascinating while still being very ‘quaffable’. Having recently finished the book, I am about to flip back to Page 1 and start again – as I am sure I will get a few more golden nuggets of insights I didn’t pick up the first time.