Sam Altman

The OpenAI-DeepMind race that set the shape of Nvidia's customer base.

Sam Altman's life, including his November 2023 firing and return at OpenAI.

A reported history of OpenAI and the industry it created.

Inside Y Combinator in the years before Altman ran it.

How Hinton, LeCun and Bengio kept neural networks alive until deep learning took off.

A tech reporter's memoir, including Sam Altman and OpenAI's board crisis.

The founder scene around OpenAI, reported from inside the funding rounds.

A novel setting Anna's ruinous affair against Levin's search for how to live.

A novel of a future world where people are bred in hatcheries into contented castes.

A novel: a mathematician foresees an empire's fall and plans to shorten the dark age.

Twenty years of watching Galapagos finches show evolution happening in real time.

Knowledge can grow without limit through good explanations that are hard to vary.

Why machines smarter than humans pose a control problem to solve before they arrive.

The struggle to make machine learning systems do what people actually intend.

The five schools of machine learning, and the search for one algorithm to unite them.

The coming of the machine age in Britain, 1660 to 1886, through eyewitness writings.

How the 37 days after Sarajevo led Europe into the First World War.

Life in Nazi concentration camps, and logotherapy: finding meaning to survive.

The theory that consciousness is learned, arising from a once two-chambered mind.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Insider account of the private race to sequence the human genome

Einstein's life and science, from the Bern patent office to relativity.

Management as production: a manager's output is the output of the team they lead.

How Xerox PARC built the first personal computer and laser printer, and lost them.

Inside Lockheed's secret projects unit, from the U-2 to the stealth fighter.

Subtitled 'Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers'

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

The history and technology of the Integral Fast Reactor built at Argonne, 1984-94.

How people will get energy two centuries from now, once fossil carbon is gone.

A Roman emperor's private notes reminding himself to live by Stoic principles.

What justice is, answered by building an ideal city in dialogue.

What makes city streets work, and how 1950s planning and slum clearance broke them.

Why AI must be redesigned from the ground up to keep superhuman machines in check.

How AI could change crime, war, justice, jobs and what it means to be human.

253 patterns for building, from the layout of towns down to a window seat.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

How a coach took the 49ers from 2 and 14 to three Super Bowls with set standards.

Sun Tzu's strategies of war applied to helping women win at love.

When and how to put speed before efficiency to capture a market before rivals.

Three generations of hackers, from MIT's AI Lab to the Homebrew club and game makers.

Seymour Cray and the supercomputer business he built and lost

The broad lines of European military history from 378 to 1515.