BATTLE TO WIN THE AI RACE

In Supremacy, Parmy Olson tells the astonishing and behind-the-scenes story of the battle between the world’s two leading artificial intelligence firms, OpenAl and DeepMind and the continuing rivalry of its founders Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis respectively

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If you walked out of the headquarters of Google in sunny Mountain View, California, and drove north for about an hour, you’d eventually hit San Francisco, step out of your car, and shiver. Here it was typically several degrees colder, with gray clouds hanging low in the sky. While Google’s hometown had T-shirt weather, you needed a jacket in OpenAl’s urban microclimate. Another big difference: the researchers at OpenAI were giddily excited about the transformer technology that Google’s management wanted to keep in a metaphorical cupboard. For the researchers based in chilly San Francisco, an idea was about to bloom.

The nonprofit lab’s two dozen or so researchers were still busy trying to emulate the success of DeepMind and were hungry to make the next big breakthrough in AI. They had watched AlphaGo defeat the world’s top Go players, and now they were training their own AI agents to play Dota 2, a complex strategic video game similar to World of Warcraft. If an AI agent could steer an elf through a fantasy world, maybe it could capture the messy and continuous nature of the real world better than DeepMind’s AlphaGo could. That seemed, on the face of it, more impressive than moving some black and white stones around on a board.