Blaise Agüera y Arcas

What Is Intelligence?

Published by MIT Press and Antikythera

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Blaise Agüera y Arcas, author, AI researcher, and CTO of Technology & Society at Google, released his new book What Is Intelligence? via MIT Press and Antikythera.

About What Is Intelligence?
What intelligence really is, and how AI’s emergence is a natural consequence of evolution.

It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis.

In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of free will, the problem of consciousness, and the ethics of machine intelligence.

The book offers a unified picture of intelligence from molecules to organisms, societies, and AI, drawing from a wide array of literature in many fields, including computer science and machine learning, biology, physics, and neuroscience. It also adds recent and novel findings from the author, his research team, and colleagues. Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute knowledge about AI development, the natural sciences (especially neuroscience), and philosophical literacy, What Is Intelligence? argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.

About Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is an author, AI researcher and Vice President / Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi) – an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, with a focus on the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution and Artificial Life.

During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.

In 2025, Blaise was appointed to the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a selective group of researchers advancing complex-systems science.

Blaise has authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as three previous books, Ubi Sunt, Who Are We Now? and What Is Life?. His latest book What Is Intelligence? is available now via Antikythera and MIT Press.