Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

This book predates AI Chat Bots and is more of a history of what led up to them. Read my review below for more information.

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Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was absolutely wonderful to read in 2026, a few years after the introduction of LLMs and GPTs. Overall, I greatly appreciated that this book provided a clear history and explanation of AI/ML technologies prior to this current boom. This book was published just a year before I began my graduate studies (in the application of AI/ML to electromagnetics ). Since I was a complete AI novice when I began my graduate studies, I wish I had read this book back then to give myself a jump start into the industry.

Along the way while reading, it was great fun to plug in the various puzzles and teasers into different LLMs. I entered the sentences from Chapter 13 into Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude; only Claude got all of them right! I also had a fun time sending the Bongard problems to ChatGPT, which nailed #98 and #91. ChatGPT got pretty close on #8, but ultimately did not quite get it right.

As I was reading, I was wondering if the prediction of LLM/GPT would be put forward. Overall, it seems that the author was pessimistic about the arrival of "general" AI (though I'd say we still are not at the point of GAI despite how advanced the latest models seem to be). Overall, this was a great overview of what lead up to where we are today with AI/ML technology, and it was made even better by the fact that it predates the ChatGPT-era. I highly recommend this to anyone with an interest in traditional AI technology.

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