Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally arrived?
In AI Valley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment. That includes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the legendary investor whom the Wall Street Journal once called, “the most connected person in Silicon Valley.”

Through Hoffman, Rivlin is granted access to a number of companies on the cutting-edge of AI research, such as Inflection AI, the company Hoffman cofounded in 2022, and OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup that sparked it all with its release at the end of that year of ChatGPT. In addition to Hoffman, Rivlin introduces us to other AI experts, including OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, an early AI startup that Google bought for $650 million in 2014. Rivlin also brings readers inside Microsoft, Meta, Google and other tech giants scrambling to keep pace.

On this vast frontier, no one knows which of these companies will hit it big–or which will flame out spectacularly. In this riveting narrative marbled with familiar names such as Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates, Rivlin chronicles breakthroughs as they happen, giving us a deep understanding of what’s around the corner in AI development. An adventure story full of drama and unforgettable personalities, AI Valley promises to be the definitive story for anyone seeking to understand the latest phase of world changing discoveries and the minds behind them.

Fun fact. Geof Hinton who co-founded the University College London’s Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit where Demis Hassibis had a research fellowship on the possibilities of neuroscience and AI was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics 2024. It was awarded for “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. The same year, Demis Hassibis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “for protein structure prediction”. Interesting coincidence.

Meanwhile, as the book extract suggests, Demis Hassibis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Mustafa Suleyman is CEO of Microsoft AI. Both of them were earlier co-founders of DeepMind, an AI company acquired by Google.

Read the extract from the book published on Moneycontrol. AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence has been published by HarperCollins India.

Gary Rivlin is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter who has been writing about technology since the mid-1990s and the rise of the internet. He is the author of nine books, including Saving Main Street and Katrina: After the Flood. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Fortune, GQ, and Wired, among other publications. He is a two-time Gerald Loeb Award winner and former reporter for the New York Times. He lives in New York with his wife, theater director Daisy Walker, and two sons.

17 May 2025