Supremacy

In one sentence: Bloomberg Opinion columnist Parmy Olson's 2024 account of the DeepMind-OpenAI race, a book David calls the main source for the DeepMind portion of Acquired's "Google: The AI Company" episode; a quote from DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg on what he needed from an investor, and the detail of Facebook's roughly $800 million bid to buy DeepMind, both anchor key beats in the episode.

Overview

Olson has covered the tech industry at Bloomberg for years, and this book tracks DeepMind and OpenAI as parallel company histories, from a small London lab to the industry-wide race ChatGPT touched off. It includes a line from DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg describing the investor he was looking for: someone "crazy enough to fund an AGI company, somebody who had the resources not to sweat a few million and liked super ambitious stuff," a description that turned out to match Peter Thiel, who ended up leading DeepMind's seed round. Another passage covers Mark Zuckerberg's approach to DeepMind in late 2013: a reported offer of up to $800 million, well above the $550 million Google eventually paid, with the condition that DeepMind give up its independence and start shipping products.

Why It's Recommended

David cites the source directly while explaining what Shane Legg was looking for at the Singularity Summit: "Shane has a quote in Parmy Olson's great book Supremacy that we used as a source for a lot of the DeepMind story." Later, laying out Facebook's bid, he attributes the figure the same way: "according to Parmy Olson in her book Supremacy, the reports are that it was up to $800 million." In the closing thank-yous, David names her again: "to Parmy Olson at Bloomberg for her book, Supremacy, about DeepMind and OpenAI, which was a main source for this episode." What the book supplies is the inside view of DeepMind's years between a small London lab and the table where Google bought it: what Shane Legg was actually betting on when he went looking for funding, and how far the Facebook acquisition talks actually got. Both are load-bearing details in the episode's "DeepMind is the YouTube of AI" framing.

Source

A core source for Google: The AI Company: Shane Legg's quote describing his ideal investor and the details of Facebook's roughly $800 million acquisition offer are drawn directly from this book. (First published 2024 by St. Martin's Press / Pan Macmillan; winner of the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year award.)