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

An explosive look at how big tech and two rival companies, seeking to build AI for the good of humanity, have grappled for control of power technology.

In November of 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. ChatGPT was unlike any technology people had used before. It seemed more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. But it was born out of an intense rivalry. Behind the scenes, battles for control and prestige at the world’s two leading AI firms, OpenAI and DeepMind, who now steers Google's AI efforts, has remained elusive -- until now.

In Supremacy, Olson, a technology columnist at Bloomberg, tells the astonishing story of how those companies grappled to use their tech for good as they served two tech Goliaths whose power was unprecedented in history. At the center of it all were two CEOs who cultivated an almost religious devotion to their mission to build god-like, super intelligent machines: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind.

Supremacy sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence that many of its top creators are ignoring: the profit-driven spread of flawed and biased technology into industries, education, media and more. With exclusive access to a network of high-ranking sources, Parmy Olson uses her more-than 13 years of experience covering technology to bring to light the exploitation of the greatest invention in human history, and how it will impact us all.

About the Author

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology, artificial intelligence, and social media. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of We Are Anonymous. Olson has been writing about artificial intelligence systems and the money behind them for seven years. Her reporting on Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and the subsequent fallout resulted in two Forbes cover stories.