The Master Algorithm

Is scarcity the defining characteristic of our time? Plagued by unaffordable housing, worker shortages, and a sluggish transition to clean energy, America faces a crisis of underbuilding. In Abundance, bestselling authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson challenge this paradigm of scarcity, delivering a compelling call to revitalize a politics of plenty. They dissect the political, economic, and cultural barriers that stifle progress, revealing how well-intentioned solutions of the past have become the obstacles of today. Abundance offers a path forward, urging us to move beyond mere preservation to a future where government effectively builds and delivers, creating a society defined not by fear, but by abundance.

From bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer Jeff Hawkins comes a revolutionary theory of intelligence, poised to reshape our understanding of the human brain and the future of AI. Despite neuroscience's advancements, the fundamental question remains: How do simple brain cells create intelligence?

Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain constructs a world model using map-like structures, creating not one, but thousands of models for everything we know. This breakthrough allows Hawkins to explore how we perceive the world, our sense of self, and the origins of higher-level thought.

A Thousand Brains introduces the "Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence," proposing that our brains are organized into thousands of independently computing units called cortical columns. Each column processes information and builds a complete, unique model of the world based on its connections. Your brain then sorts these models through a voting process, managing thousands of individual thoughts every moment.

Hawkins tackles neuroscience's enduring questions, like the purpose of pain and how we maintain perspective as we move. More than just theory, A Thousand Brains paves the way for creating truly intelligent AI, exploring how we can build machines that learn, addressing fears about superintelligence, and envisioning a future where human and machine intelligence converge. Prepare for a revolution in understanding intelligence, heralding a new era for both our minds and our machines.

The age of AI is here. Are you ready?

From Wharton professor and bestselling author Ethan Mollick, comes a revolutionary guide to thriving in the age of AI. Co-Intelligence isn't about dystopian fears or utopian promises; it's a practical playbook for understanding and mastering the new tools that are rapidly changing our world.

Since November 2022, with the arrival of ChatGPT, we've entered an era of co-intelligence – a partnership between human ingenuity and artificial intelligence. Mollick, one of today's leading voices on AI, cuts through the hype and offers a clear, optimistic vision of how AI can augment human capabilities in work, education, and life.

Co-Intelligence urges you to embrace AI as a co-worker, co-teacher, and coach, providing real-time examples and actionable strategies to harness its power. Learn how to leverage AI without losing your identity, avoid its pitfalls, and create a better future. Wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and deeply insightful, this book reveals the extraordinary potential of co-intelligence and prepares you to thrive in this new era.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller “Excellent and deeply reported.”—Tim Wu, The New York Times “Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.”— Vulture “Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional, and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and more on its implications for labor and the environment.”—Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New Yorker From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong? Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations? Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.