Matteo Wong writes:

The second floor of OpenAI’s old headquarters had a theme. Each room was named after one of the most important inventions in human history: “Clock,” “Fire,” and, of course, “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. I saw this in the spring of 2024, when I was interviewing some of the company’s researchers about recent technical advances. At the time, ChatGPT was still making embarrassing arithmetic errors, and the notion that the bot would ever rival human intelligence was dubious. But here, in the renovated shell of a former mayonnaise factory in San Francisco, AGI’s arrival was predestined.

This belief in AGI—a computer program with capabilities that rival or even exceed those of the human mind—is foundational to the mission of Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, three of the most influential AI companies in the world. And the pursuit of that milestone is the subject of The AGI Chronicles, a new book by the tech reporter and Atlantic contributing writer Kevin Roose, which he describes as his attempt to document the decade “when the human monopoly on advanced intelligence ended, and a new world was born.” Roose, a prominent and well-connected commenter on the AI boom, follows the internecine world of the frontier AI companies in remarkable, at times almost insular, detail. Based on interviews with more than 150 researchers, executives, investors, and policy makers close to the technology’s development, The AGI Chronicles traces crucial moments across DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic from 2015 through early 2026 to figure out how we got to this very messy moment in AI, and who’s responsible for what happens next.

If you scan statements from executives such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, there is a sense of fatalism about the rise of AI. In my conversation with Amodei last year, he likened developing AI to operating an out-of-control bus: It can’t be stopped or even slowed, but perhaps it can be steered. In an interview last month, Altman called AI “an inevitability.” According to this framing, AI executives are simply conductors, doing their best to provide guardrails for an era that’s careering our way, whether anyone likes it or not. Roose’s book prompted me to consider a question that is often neglected in the mile-a-minute news cycle: Are the leading AI companies simply heralding an inevitable evolution of this technology, as many of them claim, or are they directing that advancement? The answer will have tremendous bearing on how we assign responsibility for the world taking shape around us.

The AGI Chronicles is of both minds on the topic. On the one hand, Roose is very explicit that he is archiving decisions made by a small group of people. “AGI was not inevitable,” he writes, but “invented, developed, and commercialized by a few hundred people.” On the other hand, sometimes the book reads like a natural history, describing a procession of events outside the control of any specific group of people, an almost geologic force sweeping the planet as “a new world was born.” He notes how, throughout the years, various companies and officials had yet to “wake up.” By 2024, he writes, “the idea of going back to the old world, to a time before all this, seemed more delusional than expecting the exponential to continue.”

At times, Roose’s book echoes the loss of agency professed by AI executives. Of course, the inevitability of any one outcome is a self-serving fabrication. There is no prophecy that a handful of Silicon Valley companies dictating their own rules, running roughshod over copyright law and environmental regulations while mucking up once-reliable internet services with AI features nobody asked for, will operate largely unencumbered. Industries take shape through decisions made by individual actors and investors, the collective desire of the public, and the action or inaction of regulators. [Continue reading…]