How AI Thinks brings AI to the people
How AI Thinks, a book by Nigel Toon, is out today to guide interested readers through the current hype around all things AI.
In How AI Thinks, Toon provides an overview of what AI is, and more importantly, what it isn’t, how we got here, and what we might be able to do about it.
As the CEO of GraphCore in Bristol for nearly a decade, he leads a major European chip designer that has taken aim at industry giants Nvidia and AMD in the AI data centre market.
The book from an industry insider is a sensible, easy read for non-specialists, ranging from pioneers in computing from Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton to the Shannon limit and Dennard scaling, while dodging Moore’s Law. It explains convolutional and recursive neural networks and how these have evolved into the transformer models used by OpenAI and Google for AI tools such as chatCGT.
AI is moving fast, and the book has achieved a creditably fast time to market through a major publisher, as befits a senior semiconductor industry executive. Written in 2022 and 2023, it covers many of the recent issues, although in some areas it lacks depth. There is a lot of work on the bias inherent in training AI frameworks, and while this is referenced, some key research is missing. Similarly the moves to address the ethics of AI do not reference the moves of Temnit Gehru and other researchers fired from Google and where that work is heading, in the US, Europe and China.
However it does put the ethical dilemma of the Trolley problem to bed. This is often brought up to highlight the ethical challenges of AI for autonomous passenger vehicles, but Toon highlights clearly how it is based on a false premise.
Overall, he does give a simple framework for assessing what we know about AI, how it manifests and how we can mitigate its effects to protect people.
The speed to market is a very good thing for such a fast moving topic as we know well at eeNews Europe, and the next edition is likely to include much more as the AI industry moves forward. Whether it matures remains to be seen.
How AI Thinks by Nigel Toon is available on Amazon and at www.penguin.co.uk/books/458966/how-ai-thinks-by-toon-nigel/9781911709466
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