Commonwealth Club: Kevin Roose: Inside the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence

Imagine a 21st century Manhattan Project, tasked with creating artificial general intelligence. That’s what a handful of AI companies have been racing to do over the past decade, seeking to build the most powerful technology in history: artificial general intelligence, or 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. Kevin Roose reveals a behind-the-scenes account of the trillion-dollar sprint to create AGI in his new book The AGI Chronicles. Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history. 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. Roose 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 gives us the inside story of 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. Join us here in San Francisco, the heart of the AI revolution, to hear Kevin Roose reveal the most high-stakes technological quest in human history―an audacious attempt to create a new, alien form of intelligence that could either save humanity or destroy it.