difficult listen

The theme is to explain to non-experts what artificial intelligence is in 2021. Metz tells a stories about the "AI Movement," each chapter a standalone citing notable people and detailing the systems they've been building. Narration is an exemplar of pacing, really moves you forward.

Chapters range in length from 16 to 40 minutes, each a separate narrative. I advise to treat each chapter as a formal lecture. With the partial exception of Geoffrey Hinton, you're not getting much background on any of the geniuses. I didn't feel strong emotion connection to anybody cited so this clearly doesn't fall into the same category as a Michael Lewis book.

I believe we the listening public are waiting for visceral books having to do with AI that'll make us feel goosebumps and even cry. But this is essentially a survey course. Metz makes aspects of AI more accessible and you can take what he says to the bank. If you were looking for a memoir or biography, I think you'd be at peril of wanting your credit back.

4 people found this helpful

All story, no technical details

It's a well-told and entertaining history of AI, but not comprehensive or technical in any way.

If you are anything like me, you also prefer books with more meat; but this one will partially satiate that insatiable desire for such rare finds.

The narration was great.

1 person found this helpful

Worth a listen

Contrary to some of the other reviews, I thought the narration was fine. I found that the contents of the book were extremely interesting and enjoyable!

Interesting storyline

It was nice to know a bit more about the history of the characters and their interraltions on academia and industry.

Great history of AI

This is a great read for anyone who loves computer science and is curious about AI and its current place in society. It jumps around a bit but overall I couldn't stop listening.

Narrator style doesn’t meet the book style.

This book is great to understand the story behind AI. But sadly the narrator style didn’t match the narrative and book style. Is so awkward that it was hard to follow the story.

Great story, awful narration

The story is really informative and gives you a good idea of the major players and their background in the AI field. However, the narration is so annoying it makes you want to pull your hair out. The narrator starts every sentence very strong and then trails off the last word, to the point where you can never hear the last word of each sentence. I just couldn't ignore the speech pattern, similar to how you notice every time a person says "um" or "like".

BERT! Good information, colorful descriptions of

This is an interesting discussion of some of the AI academic leaders, and leading companies especially Google, Deep Mind, Open AI, etc. I liked how the author talked about the BERT open language processing software from Google, the tensor flow processors and graphics chips machines.

The author also describes the excessive bragging and "one- ups-man-ship" of some of the AI competitors. With deep mind co-founder Demis Hasabbis even claiming, in developing an AI company, "it's not for the money." ? This, right before they sold their 10 person company to Google for $500 million.

While the author does a good job of outlining the braggadocios careers of these guys, over several chapters it occurred to me, what do Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Ilya Sutzkever, Larry Page and Sergei Brin all have in common? They are all jewish computer science entrepreneurs, some immigrants, who at an unbelievably young age, around 26 or 30, become mega-millionaires, some even billionaires, according to the book. Altman is classed as a "dropout" who became a "master" at fund raising, all within the first 2 years of leaving school. While Sutzkever and others are pegged as the prototypical "complete computer scientist genius". However, it is with out question that the young entrepreneurs had help from others within their ethnic group - such as wealthy Jewish billionaires, people who they may be related to, or mega banks such as Goldman Sachs, in obtaining seed money (in a similar fashion that African American basketball millionaires fund black startups, the Chinese fund Asian seed money groups, etc.) They were simply pigeon-holed by them to become super role models and "hero" examples. No doubt there are many, many others with similar skills as these fellows who have tried to raise capital to fund machine learning startups and have been blanked because of no wealthy connections. Still, the book provokes one into more serious discussions of the field and the IT industry in general.

An important story that is not well known.

AI is either going to make us or break us. I’m not so sure people are ready to play God.

Excellent overview of AI and the players

Cade Metz does an excellent job of making artificial intelligence accessible to anyone. For those who already know something about the topic, there's sure to be tidbits that even the most knowledgeable subject matter expert wouldn't know.

At the same time, his stories of the people bring out the humanity and the challenges of what they're trying to do. The book deals with the tension between creating the seemingly impossible artificial general intelligence and AI specific use cases. Whatever happens, it is clear that big changes are afoot.

The narrator is engaging, warm and does a good job of bringing the words to life.