Top AI books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite AI books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of AI

Understanding the concepts of AI starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

The Society of Mind

The society of mind theory views the human mind and any other naturally evolved cognitive systems as a vast society of individually simple processes known as agents. These processes are the fundamental thinking entities from which minds are built, and together produce the many abilities we attribute to minds.

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Artificial Intelligence Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction

Artificial Intelligence Basics has arrived to equip you with a fundamental, timely grasp of AI and its impact. Author Tom Taulli provides an engaging, non-technical introduction to important concepts such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), robotics, and more.

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Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

Something new entered our world in November 2022 — the first general purpose AI that could pass for a human and do the kinds of creative, innovative work that only humans could do previously. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick immediately understood what ChatGPT meant: after millions of years on our own, humans had developed a kind of co-intelligence that could augment, or even replace, human thi…

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Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning is an autonomous, self-teaching system that essentially learns by trial and error. It performs actions with the aim of maximizing rewards, or in other words, it is learning by doing in order to achieve the best outcomes.

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Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the specie…

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Artificial Intelligence Engines: A Tutorial Introduction to the Mathematics of Deep Learning

In this richly illustrated book, key neural network learning algorithms are explained informally first, followed by detailed mathematical analyses. Topics include both historically important neural networks (e.g. perceptrons), and modern deep neural networks (e.g. generative adversarial networks).

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Additional AI Reading

These books are not required for you to learn AI, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan explores how artificial intelligence will shape the world in the next two decades. They present scenarios where AI could help solve some of our biggest problems, while also acknowledging the challenges and ethical implications of this technology.

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The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? Drawing on more than a decade of research, award‑winning scholar Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers to the data taken …

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The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

"The Singularity Is Near" portrays what life will be like after this event? a human-machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.

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Deep Learning

Deep learning is a method in artificial intelligence (AI) that teaches computers to process data in a way that is inspired by the human brain. Deep learning models can recognize complex patterns in pictures, text, sounds, and other data to produce accurate insights and predictions.

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Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Global Edition

Thelong-anticipated revision of ArtificialIntelligence: A Modern Approach explores the full breadth and depth of the field of artificialintelligence (AI). The 4th Edition brings readers up to date on the latest technologies,presents concepts in a more unified manner, and offers new or expanded coverageof machine learning, deep learning, transfer learning, multi agent systems,robotics, natural …

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Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction

The book covers mathematical background (including linear algebra and optimization), basic supervised learning (including linear and logistic regression and deep neural networks), as well as more advanced topics (including transfer learning and unsupervised learning).

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Specializations and Deeper AI Knowledge

You've got your basics in order – time to move on to some advanced and specialized concepts. AI is evolving every day, these books can help you master it.

Artificial Intelligence By Example: Acquire Advanced AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning Design Skills, 2nd Edition

AI has the potential to replicate humans in every field. Artificial Intelligence By Example, Second Edition serves as a starting point for you to understand how AI is built, with the help of intriguing and exciting examples. This book will make you an adaptive thinker and help you apply concepts to real-world scenarios. Using some of the most interesting AI examples, right from computer progra…

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The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. He assembles a blueprint for the futu…

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This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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After 2 decades in Tech, leading software engineering teams at both Google, Microsoft, and studying coaching at Stanford, I would love to give back to the community, and spread my mentorship and coaching help to more engineers. Transforming someone's career and helping others unlock their true potentials, has been one …

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I'm a Principal Research Scientist at Motorola Solutions, where I work on cutting-edge deep learning/computer vision algorithms for the security industry. I have 7+ years of industry experience, also having worked at Amazon and IBM Research. I can help with any of the following: * Guidance toward learning and acquiring …

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