Genius Makers by Cade Metz

With the popularity of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence (AI) is getting more attention than ever. Even though I’m working as a data engineer, besides a rudimentary understanding and occasionally using ChatGPT, I have limited knowledge when it comes to AI and how it got to today’s prominence. So when I was browsing an Indigo book store nearby, Genius Makers by Cade Metz was my #1 choice from the Heather’s pick recommendation section.

Instead of focusing on the CEOs of leading tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Baidu and OpenAI, Cade focused on the engineers and academics working on pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. This gave the story a refreshing narrative as media often focuses on the CEOs and top executives instead. By following the career progression of leading figures in the field, it helps illustrate how fierce the competition for talent was and the potential people see in it.

Unbeknownst to me, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the leading figures in deep learning, did research and taught at University of Toronto where I also went to school. Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award with Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning and are regarded as the Godfathers of Deep Learning. Their influence spanned multiple companies, with many of their students and previous colleagues working at leading positions in the field today.

One of the main takeaways I got is the challenges these AI scientists and academics have to overcome and the persistence it requires from the community to get artificial intelligence to where it is today. Decades ago, artificial intelligence involves coding up complex behavioral logic one line at a time. Deep learning on the other hand was often ridiculed by the leading scientists at the time. This made advancement in this field much more difficult since without broad support funds were also hard to come by in a field that requires heavy machinery and resources.

Genius Makers by Cade Metz is a page turner. It touches on the key advancement and milestone for AI, including DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeating one of the best GO players in the world, OpenAI and how it got to this point, the arms race for AI talent, and a hot topic these days… the ethics of AI. With more company investing resources into AI and the growing utility and adoption in everyday lives, it’s an exciting field to follow. I would highly recommend this book if you would like to also know the history of AI and the leading contributors of it.