Daemon came out in 2006. Daniel Suarez originally self-published it under the name Leinad Zeraus, which is his own name spelled backwards, and Goodreads still files it that way. That is how I found out, and it is a good indication of how long this book has been quietly circulating.
The premise is that a famous computer game designer dies, and the software he left behind reads his obituary online and starts acting on it. From there it spreads outward into the economy and eventually into how society organises itself. It is a thriller first, and a good one, but Suarez is clearly more interested in the second-order effects than in the chase scenes.
What I enjoyed most is that the projections have aged well. A lot of what must have read as far-fetched in 2006 now looks straightforwardly feasible, and in some cases mundane.
The funny part is what happens around the intelligence itself. Suarez obviously didn’t expect that language models would get this good, so he works around the problem. The daemon is scripted and trigger based rather than something that reasons about the world, and you can feel him routing carefully around a capability that hadn’t been invented yet. Reading it now, the workaround is more conspicuous than the predictions.
I read this as light near-future science fiction that takes one strong premise and thinks seriously about its economic and social consequences, which is my favourite thing for the genre to do.