These Strange New Minds by Christopher Summerfield - ISBN: 9780241694664
Paperback
AI’s here: Understand it, or risk a future unknown.

These Strange New Minds

How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

$33.71

  • Paperback

    384 pages

  • Release Date

    17 June 2025

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Summary

Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and refashion society in unpredictable ways. We can expect these AI systems to soon be making autonomous decisions on the user’s behalf, with transformative impact on everything we do. It is vital we understand how they work.

Can AI systems ‘think’, ‘know’ and ‘understand’? Could they manipula…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780241694664
ISBN-10:0241694663
Author:Christopher Summerfield
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint:Viking
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:384
Release Date:17 June 2025
Weight:463g
Dimensions:27mm x 155mm x 233mm
A-Format
B-Format
These Strange New Minds by Christopher Summerfield - ISBN: 9780241694664
155 × 233 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

A brilliant guide to the most important technology of our times – Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI & Cofounder of DeepMind
By far the best guide to a newly emerging species with which we will share the planet for the foreseeable future – Stuart Russell, author of Human Compatible
As a leading authority in both computational neuroscience and the social impacts of AI, Christopher Summerfield is perfectly situated to explore the meaning and implications of these machines that are so uncannily like – and unlike – ourselves – Brian Christian, co-author of Algorithms to Live by
Summerfield takes us on a tour of this astonishing new technolog - general purpose AI - and helps us to understand the issues it raises. You might choose to be alarmed, excited, or indifferent to large language models but you should read Chris’s book before you decide – Mike Woolridge, author of The Road to Conscious Machines
With clarity, insight and wit, Summerfield dives beneath the ever-breaking wave of large language models to reveal the deeper principles at play, and the challenges and opportunities that these powerful new technologies present. An essential and highly readable guide to thinking abut how, and weather, computers can think, what’s coming next and what we should do about it – Anil Seth, author of Being You
‘A closeup look at the large language models that have radically changed computer technology…a clear-minded, accessible examination of how AI systems work’ * Kirkus *
For readers fascinated by the future of AI, this book is an eye-opening exploration of a revolution unfolding before our eyes * New York Journal of Books *

Summerfield, a neuroscientist at Oxford, charts the evolution of artificial intelligence, from early large language models to today’s ChatGPT, and reflects on the larger questions of learning and
consciousness

* The New York Times *

About The Author

Christopher Summerfield

Christopher Summerfield

Christopher Summerfield is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. His research spans both human brain studies and the development of artificial intelligence.

He is a recipient of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award (2015) and frequently delivers keynote addresses globally. Summerfield has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications. His academic book, Natural General Intelligence: How understanding the brain can help us build AI, received widespread acclaim. [Title of current book] is his first book intended for a general audience.

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