Genius Makers

Why it’s on the list: Metz’s history of the deep-learning revival told through its people — Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, the DeepMind acquisition, the 2012 auction that sent Hinton’s group to Google. The narrative history of how the field got bought.

Where I saw it: In the reply thread to @typesfast’s question, “What’s the best history book you’ve read?” (June 5, 2025) — a crowd-sourced list Kyle recovered by hand and saved to his Apple Note “Books To Read”; the full set of replies lives on What’s the best history book… (tweet). It was listed there as “Genius Makers”.

Connections

• Artificial Intelligence — the field’s institutional history.
• Machine Learning — the technical turn the book narrates.
• Why Machines Learn — the mathematics under the same story, named in a different thread Kyle saved.
• What’s the best history book… (tweet) — the thread this recommendation came from.