The AGI Chronicles

By: Kevin Roose

THE AGI CHRONICLES is not a futurist manifesto, an academic chin-stroker, a corporate biography, or a self-help manual. It’s the inside story of the birth of AGI, as told by the people who are bringing it into existence, or trying to stop it from coming into existence, and who are grappling with the consequences before anyone else.

Building Artificial General Intelligence – a machine that is as smart or smarter than humans, at everything our brains can do – has been the goal for the world’s biggest technology companies for about the last decade, and it is probably the most consequential technological project in history.

Only a few hundred people are fully awake to what’s actually happening on the AI frontier, or how short the timelines are. Powerful AI will reshape society – and most governments and big corporations already view this conclusion as obvious, as evidenced by the trillions of dollars they’re spending to get there first.

New York Times journalist Kevin Roose may be the only person who can tell this story. He has put his life on hold, gone to the heart of the action, interviewed those who have been involved in building this technology, digging up secrets and putting together the first major behind-the-scenes account of this race.

And the people building powerful AI are much, much weirder than you’d think. If you dig beneath the corporate veneers, the AI scene here is full of messianic claims, cult-like dynamics, and a degree of belief in the inevitability and imminence of powerful AI that can strike the uninitiated as genuinely insane.

This is gripping, characterful, first draft of history that reads like a non-fiction thriller, for readers of THE BIG SHORT, CARELESS PEOPLE and AMERICAN PROMETHEUS. It’s the book that people will turn to one hundred years from now as a defining account of the moment our species was changed for ever.