Book Review: These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means by Christopher Summerfield

This review was first published by Booklist on March 1, 2025.

**STARRED REVIEW** Summerfield, neuroscientist and former researcher at Deepmind, offers one of the most balanced and realistic assessments of the current state of AI technology as well as a summary of how AI was first conceived and developed. In doing so, he spends as much time exploring linguistics and neuroscience as he does with technology. Noam Chomsky is as much a part of this as Alan Turing is. Summerfield examines the philosophies of the major players in the AI sphere and spends some time assessing the various hopes and fears people have for it. Amongst the slate of AI-focused, pop-sci books hitting the shelves recently, this one does the best job of explaining for a lay reader how AI is structured and trained. But Summerfield takes it further, comparing the ways AI functions to the workings of the human brain to show not just the potential of AI for true intelligence and creativity but also that AI is fundamentally different from human intelligence. Those differences pose the biggest challenges to the next steps of AI development. This technology contains both tremendous potential and very real danger. Summerfield tackles all this with humor, wit, and candor.