I picked this book from a linkedin recommendation by a person who was in the jury of the Financial Times awards for the best business book 2025. This book was judged to be the winner of 2025.
I am familiar with the AI space and also the company Nvidia, even having the opportunity to chat with Jensen Huang once in Stockholm. In spite of working in this domain for the last 8 odd years, the book opened to me so much trivia and details that I was not aware of previously.
My favourite anecdote was of the Norwegian researcher Fredrik Dahl, who created the first neural network that could beat a human at the game of backgammon. The software was also commercially successful. Fredrik did this in 1994, which is almost 30 years before this AI era as we know it. This led me to sharing this story with my Norwegian friends and having some indirect conversations with Fredrik, who is still researching AI topics in Oslo.
The author has done a meticulous job of interviewing a great many people and bringing about the nuance to share the story of one of the greatest companies of our time. He brings multiple views and also provides without much technical jargon for a lay person to understand the complexity of technology that is changing the world as we speak.
I would highly recommend this book to everyone who is linked with the field of AI or even a user of AI. As this technology is the most fundamental technology of our times and this book provides a unique perspective from the mind of builders who have contributed one of the main vehicles (chip) for this revolution to happen!
