These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

An insider look at the Large Language Models (LLMs) that are revolutionizing our relationship to technology, exploring their surprising history, what they can and should do for us today, and where they will go in the future--from an AI pioneer and neuroscientist

In this accessible, up-to-date, and authoritative examination of the world’s most radical technology, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explores what it really takes to build a brain from scratch. We have entered a world in which disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us - and are beginning to transform everything we do. But can AI ’think’, ’know’ and ’understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?

These Strange New Minds charts the evolution of intelligent talking machines and provides us with the tools to understand how they work and how we can use them. Ultimately, armed with an understanding of AI’s mysterious inner workings, we can begin to grapple with the existential question of our age: have we written ourselves out of history or is a technological utopia ahead?

Christopher Summerfield has one foot in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience - studying the brains of humans, as Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at theUniversity of Oxford - and the other in AI research, helping build intelligentsystems as a Staff Research Scientist at the pioneering Google DeepMind. He has won several awards, including the prestigious Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award in 2015. He is regularly invited to give keynote talks across the world. Christopher has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and book chapters and his academic book, Natural Genera lIntelligence: How Understanding the Brain Can Help Us Build AI, was widely acclaimed. This is his first book for a general readership.