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If you work in financial services, AI is no longer something happening to other industries. It’s reshaping how your firm operates, how your clients invest, and how you communicate. Which makes it worth understanding where this technology actually came from, and who controls it.
Parmy Olson’s Supremacy tells that story through the rivalry between two figures: Sam Altman at OpenAI and Demis Hassabis at DeepMind. Both started with genuinely idealistic ambitions to build artificial intelligence that would benefit humanity. Both ended up in the gravitational pull of Microsoft and Google, where those ambitions quietly gave way to the commercial imperatives of two of the most powerful companies on earth.
Olson, a Bloomberg tech columnist who has covered AI since 2016, had remarkable access to the people involved, and the result is a book that reads less like a technology primer and more like a corporate power struggle with global consequences.
What struck me most about Supremacy is its focus on control: who funds the technology, who governs it, and whose interests it ultimately serves. For anyone advising financial services firms navigating AI adoption, we think those questions matter at least as much as the technology itself. The book won the 2024 FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year, which tells you something about its credibility with a financially literate audience.
- 2026, Books, January, Liminal recommends, Newsletters