The AGI Chronicles
The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.99/mo for 3 months + £10 Audible bonus
Auto-renews at £5.99/month after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Offer ends on 28 December, 2026.
The AGI Chronicles
Narrated by:
Kevin Roose
Buy Now for £16.58
-
Narrated by:
-
Kevin Roose
-
By:
-
Kevin Roose
Summary
‘Highlights just how much the ambitions, ideological divides and personality clashes of a group small enough to fit in a couple of classrooms have shaped what may turn out to be the most consequential technology in modern history’ Economist
This is the story of the twenty-first century’s Manhattan Project: the trillion-dollar sprint to create artificial general intelligence.
For the last decade, a handful of companies have been racing to build the most powerful technology in history: artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a computer system capable of outdoing humans at almost anything. Some of them hoped AGI would cure diseases and heal the planet. Others feared it could kill everyone on Earth. They decided to build it anyway.
Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Kevin Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history. With reportorial rigor and page-turning suspense, he takes us inside the rooms where researchers watch large language models learn to talk, reason and code at superhuman speed. He brings us to the White House, where top officials grapple with a technology that is improving too fast to understand, let alone regulate. He offers new details on the disagreements that led the founders of Anthropic to defect from OpenAI and fresh reporting on Sam Altman’s dramatic firing – and equally dramatic reinstatement – as CEO. He charts Google’s frantic attempt to catch up to the AI frontier. And he ushers us into the San Francisco AI scene, where ‘accelerationists’ in hacker houses and ‘doomers’ at AI safety summits battle each other for supremacy.
More than a billion people now use AI every day, yet almost nobody knows how it was created. The AGI Chronicles is the definitive, behind-the-scenes account of how an obscure research project became the defining technology of our age.
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
Critic reviews
'Mr Roose captures the madness in a fast-paced style. His account is filled with gossipy anecdotes that highlight just how much the ambitions, ideological divides and personality clashes of a group small enough to fit in a couple of classrooms have shaped what may turn out to be the most consequential technology in modern history.'
‘In this exciting and brilliantly reported book, Kevin Roose takes us behind the scenes of the secretive race to create artificial general intelligence. It’s filled with drama and bitter rivalries, very colorful characters and fascinating breakthroughs. He makes the technology understandable while also conveying the historic nature of a new world being born’ (Walter Isaacson)
‘By taking us inside the deeply human culture where AGI is being built, Kevin Roose brilliantly captures a truth I’ve long argued: AI is not an alien invasion, but a profound product of our own humanity. It is a tool we are creating from within ourselves to reach beyond our biological limitations. The AGI Chronicles provides the vital human context for the intelligence explosion ahead’ (Ray Kurzweil, Inventor, Futurist, Author of The Singularity Is Nearer)
'An impressive job of covering an incredibly fast-moving field . . . will be an important part of future AI histories'
‘Stuffed with head-spinning journeys into how AI/AGI models are constructed and trained . . . The best single explainer of how artificial intelligence came about, and what might happen next’
‘[Roose] delivers a propulsive chronicle of the breakneck sprint to develop artificial general intelligence . . . Clear-eyed, deeply reported and brisk, Roose’s account is an indispensable window into how the world arrived at a precarious technological inflection point’
Enjoyed it!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
great summary
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
a must must must read or listen
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.