Gary Rivlin — Multi-Part, Part One: Gary Rivlin, author of AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence, explores the origins and personalities driving the modern artificial intelligence revolution. Rivl

Gary Rivlin — Multi-Part, Part One: Gary Rivlin, author of AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence, explores the origins and personalities driving the modern artificial intelligence revolution. Rivlin begins by demythologizing AI, focusing on central figures such as Reid Hoffman, a polymath whose childhood obsession with strategy games and thirst for human connection led him to co-found LinkedIn and become a premier venture capitalist. Hoffman represents the bloomer perspective, an optimist who sees AI as a co-pilot to amplify human intelligence. The narrative highlights the interconnectedness of Silicon Valley, tracing the friendships and debates between Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk that date back to their early days at PayPal. The history of AI is traced to Frank Rosenblatt's 1950s vision of neural networks, which aimed to create machines that learn as humans do. This approach was long ridiculed by proponents of rules-based computing, leading to decades of AI winters in which funding and interest evaporated. The revival came in the 2010s with Mustafa Suleyman and Demis Hassabis, whose London-based startup DeepMind proved that neural networks could master complex tasks through feedback. After Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, Elon Musk, fearing a corporate monopoly on the technology, co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit. The discussion concludes with the rise of Sam Altman and the 2017 Transformer paper, a breakthrough from Google researchers that allowed computers to understand context, ultimately enabling generative AI and ChatGPT. (1)