AI for Smarties Understanding Artificial Intelligence
By Bertrand Meyer
Published by Smarties Press,
July 2026
272 + x pages 17 chapters + Bibliography, glossary, index Full color 82 figures, numerous other illustrations
AI for Smarties — Understanding Artificial Intelligence” is a general introduction to AI, presenting the technology as clearly as possible. It does not shy away from the technical aspects and in particular the math, but explains everything and assumes no special knowledge from the reader.
One of the reasons for writing this book was that I kept running into people with a good education who were fascinated by AI but had no clue of what’s inside; unable, for example, to answer such questions as “what does a neuron in a neural network actually compute”? The book explains this and all the essentials, all the way to transformers (the explanations for which in the literature are, in my experience, often nebulous, complicated and confusing).
It also discusses many practical aspects of AI, with two chapters on education (one about self-learning and the other about educational institutions) and chapters respectively on using AI properly, the risks of AI (hallucinations, IP looting, AGI, good form covering bad substance etc.), organizing one’s career in the presence of AI, and of course the effect on software development.
