Book review number 250
This is my two hundred fiftieth review on Goodreads since 2010. You can read them all, fiction, non-fiction, and all sorts of other stuff, at this link:
Rich Magahiz’s reviews on Goodreads
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a solid piece of work on the state of machine learning which is so rapidly changing that one of the main platforms she uses in her examples, GPT-2, has already been replaced by another one with capabilities a hundred or more times that of its predecessor. So while it gives a good account of the challenges in applying the technology, it will only be a snapshot in time of how far researchers have been able to go (until it is revised perhaps some day). It draws on her popular blog with examples of her own experiments along with descriptions of what other researchers have been working on as broadly as can be accommodated in a work aimed at a general audience. Although I do have some involvement with deep learning in my job, my own interest is that of someone who is interested in the technology in a general way.