Today is the official release day for my little book on Artificial General Intelligence, published by MIT Press. It’s available on the shelf of well-stocked booksellers, and I wrote it to be accessible to as large audience as possible; it’s not really a technical book, even though it tackles some technical topics. I started working on this book about two years ago, and much has happened in the AI space since then. Still, I think it holds up well.
One of the main points is that artificial general intelligence is a confused and confusing idea, largely because we don’t know what either intelligence or generality means. We keep making impressive progress in AI technology – and I try to explain some key AI methods, such as LLMs, in simple terms – but the various AI methods have different upsides and downsides, and we are far from having a single system that can do everything we think of as needing “intelligence”. Clearly, the future of AI has room for many perspectives and different technical approaches. The book also discusses what more progress in AI could mean for society, and draws on science fiction to paint contrasting visions of what AGI might look like.
This has been a passion project of mine that I ended up using much of my sabbatical on. I’m an optimist, and I argue for open access to knowledge and technology, and against undue regulations. If I can achieve anything with this book, I hope that it will be to explain some of the wonderful possibilities of this technology to people, as it is natural to be afraid of things you don’t understand.
Here is the book page if you are interested in reading it:
It’s also available as an audiobook through the usual channels, and will eventually be translated to several languages.
