Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World

A Bloomberg technology journalist spent years inside OpenAI and DeepMind to write this account of the race to build artificial general intelligence. It reads like a geopolitical thriller because the stakes are genuinely that high.

Parmy Olson has covered the AI industry since before most people knew what a transformer model was. In Supremacy, she documents the competition between OpenAI and DeepMind not as a business story but as a study in competing visions of what AI should be and who it should serve. She has extraordinary access: to the researchers, the investors, the executives, and the internal conflicts that shaped both organizations. The portrait of Sam Altman is unflattering in specific, sourced ways. The portrait of Demis Hassabis is more complicated than most coverage has allowed.

This belongs in courses on technology governance, science policy, media studies, and any seminar examining how power concentrates in innovation-driven industries. It is also a book that faculty in business, law, and public policy will find useful when they want to understand what happened in Silicon Valley between 2015 and 2024 and why it matters for everything that comes next. Olson does not editorialize excessively; she reports and lets the material carry the argument.

Crown, 2024. Hardcover.