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

Includes bibliographical references (pages 349-360) and index.

Part one: How did we get here? Eight billion minds -- Chess or ice skating? -- A universal ontology -- The birth of the neural network -- Tales of the unexpected -- The emergence of thinking -- Part two: What is a language model? The power of words -- Signs of the times -- Sense and nonsense -- The company of words -- Maps of meaning -- The word forecast -- Robots in disguise -- LLMs as linguistic theories -- Part three: Do language models think? Artificial awareness -- The intentional stance -- Mind the gap -- The reductionist critique -- Duck or parrot? -- Language models, fast and slow -- Emergent cognition -- The National Library of Thailand -- Part four: What should a language model say? The crimson hexagon -- Playing it safe -- Fake it until you make it -- Playing language games -- 'WokeGPT' -- Perlocutionary acts -- Getting personal -- Democratizing reality -- Part five: What could a language model do? Just imagine -- AI autopropaganda -- The perils of personalization -- A model with a plan -- Thinking out loud -- Using tools -- Going surfing -- The instrumental gap -- Part six: Are we all doomed? Mêlée à trois -- Natural language killers -- Going rogue -- The intelligence flash crash -- Our technological future.

"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?" -- Provided by publisher.