First published in hardcover in Great Britain by Viking, part of Penguin Random House Group of companies, Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2025

Part 1. How did we get here? -- part 2. What is a language model? -- part 3. Do language models think? -- part 4. What should a language model say? -- part 5. What could a language model do? -- part 6. Are we all doomed?

"An insider look at the Large Language Models (LLMs) that are revolutionizing our relationship to technology, exploring their surprising history, what they can and should do for us today, and where they will go in the future--from an AI pioneer and neuroscientist. In this accessible, up-to-date, and authoritative examination of the world's most radical technology, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explores what it really takes to build a brain from scratch. We have entered a world in which disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us--and are beginning to transform everything we do. But can AI 'think', 'know' and 'understand'? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence? These Strange New Minds charts the evolution of intelligent talking machines and provides us with the tools to understand how they work and how we can use them. Ultimately, armed with an understanding of AI's mysterious inner workings, we can begin to grapple with the existential question of our age: have we written ourselves out of history or is a technological utopia ahead?" --