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How AI Thinks

How we built it, how it can help us, and how we can control it

Nigel Toon author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Transworld Publishers Ltd

Publishing:6th Feb '25

£10.99

This title is due to be published on 6th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This paperback is available in another edition too:

How AI Thinks cover

THE #2 TIMES BESTSELLER

'Artificial intelligence is going to have a massive impact on everyone’s lives... an accessible and sensible read that helps demystify AI' Deborah Meaden, entrepreneur and star of Dragon's Den

'Nigel Toon is a visionary leader in the field of artificial intelligence... a must-read' Marc Tremblay, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft


Those who understand how AI thinks are about to win big.

We are used to thinking of computers as being a step up from calculators - very good at storing information, and maybe even at playing a logical game like chess. But up to now they haven't been able to think in ways that are intuitive, or respond to questions as a human might. All that has changed, dramatically, in the past few years.

Our search engines are becoming answer engines. Artificial intelligence is already revolutionising sectors from education to healthcare to the creative arts. But how does an AI understand sentiment or context? How does it play and win games that have an almost infinite number of moves? And how can we work with AI to produce insights and innovations that are beyond human capacity, from writing code in an instant to unfolding the elaborate 3D puzzles of proteins?

We stand at the brink of a historic change that will disrupt society and at the same time create enormous opportunities for those who understand how AI thinks. Nigel Toon shows how we train AI to train itself, so that it can paint images that have never existed before or converse in any language. In doing so he reveals the strange and fascinating ways that humans think, too, as we learn how to live in a world shared by machine intelligences of our own creation.

Few books are more timely than How AI Thinks, an accessible guide that walks the reader through the technology’s developmental history right back to the days before the computer... This is a fascinating read. -- Simon Hunt * Evening Standard *
A sparky new book on artificial intelligence... How AI Thinks provides a brisk and well-grounded introduction to how AI has evolved since the term was first coined in 1955, how it is used today and how it may (we hope) be controlled. -- John Thornhill * Financial Times *

ISBN: 9781804995976

Dimensions: 199mm x 129mm x 21mm

Weight: 227g

320 pages