Smart until It’s Dumb

By: Emmanuel Maggiori

Narrated by: Slade Hovick

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—powering news feeds, curating search results, and invisibly steering our lives. We talk to it and, increasingly, it talks back. And sometimes, its answers seem eerily smart, until they don't.

Billions of dollars have been poured into AI, yet it keeps surprising us with its epic fails—confidently wrong chatbots, inadvertently racist photo apps, well-meaning autonomous cars that fail to recognize traffic cones. Industry insider Emmanuel Maggiori cuts through the hype, revealing the deceptively simple mechanisms behind AI’s impressive results—and its spectacular blunders.

Learn the dark secret of the AI industry—how unreasonable expectations, shady practices, and outright lying have inflated a bubble of monumental proportions.

Listen to Smart until It’s Dumb to discover how AI really works, why it’s not always so smart, and why the AI bubble is about to burst. Emmanuel Maggiori, PhD, is a 10-year AI industry insider, specialized in machine learning and scientific computing. He helps companies build complex software. He has developed AI for a wide variety of applications, from extracting objects from satellite images to packaging holiday deals for millions of travelers every day.

©2023 Emmanuel Maggiori (P)2023 Emmanuel Maggiori

Important perspective

Very worthwhile and cogently laid out, The book is an important perspective on the possibilities but also limitations of AI, particularly as practical applications of AI are being rolled out in almost every field.

Very interesting perspective

I'm really happy I listened to this. AI is such a relevant topic in all of our lives these days, I felt it was important to understand it a bit more. I appreciated the basics/background provided but have to admit the programming overview was a bit over my head. I understood the highlights but would have to listen again and take lots of notes before I'd be able to explain it to someone else - ya know?

But it was enough of an explanation to understand the examples provided. And my big takeaway here (hopefully this is in line with what the author was actually trying to convey!) is that PEOPLE are the problem, not AI. People make bad decisions, people choose their own self interest over the greater good, etc. This isn't a big surprise, right? But I definitely expected to come away from this book with a greater fear of AI - and I didn't.

Not to say there's nothing to worry about: AI is designed and managed by people so all the dumb things they/we do will continue to impact AI, I guess forever. But I'm happy to have had a brief look inside this controversial industry. Would recommend to anyone alive today.

Everyone should read this book

Fantastic book if it wasn’t for this book I would have never understood AI and how this bubble will burst in a few years

A crystal ball predicting AI's likely downfall

As sure as the sun rises, someone somewhere is proclaiming the next great thing that AI will solve. But, that would be the first thing AI has solved because it's track record is full of bumps and potholes, missed targets, and outright errors. Maggiori does a fantastic analysis of the history and efforts that brought us to the current state of machine learning, in easy to follow language with practical examples. Hovick's narration is clear and expressive, allowing the author's experience in the field shine through. This title won't make you an expert in the field, but it will bring you up to date with the attempts and failures that companies of all shapes and sizes have been trying to pigeonhole into self-proclaimed AI successes. A useful and educational listen. [disclosure: I received this title for free and listen at 1.85x]