Tech Writer Kevin Roose on the Trillion-Dollar Sprint to Build Artificial General Intelligence

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Alexis Madrigal (0:23)

Welcome to Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal. In the startup days of Open AI, Ilya Sutskovor, a key member of the team, would implore his colleagues to feel the AGI. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, and it's the shorthand for extremely intelligent software that can do just about anything on a screen or with symbols that a human can do, and then some. The cloud or ChatGPT that you might use today is the result of more than a decade of people trying to build AGI. And along the way, some of those people have gotten a glimmer of the ways that machine intelligence might transform the world. That bigger sense, an almost cosmic fear or appreciation that something is fundamentally different about this new machine learning technology, that's feeling the AGI.

Maybe you haven't felt it yet, maybe you never will, but many of the most powerful people on the planet and many of the soon to be richest people in the Bay Area felt the AGI early and those vibes led them to create wildly competent AI models that have the capacity to transform many things about our society.

This is the story that Kevin Roose tells in his new book, The AGI Chronicles, the inside story of the race to create an artificial super intelligence. It's the one volume history you need of the current industry from the early open AI and deep mind experiment to today's reasoning models and vibe coding. It's a book you can just hand to someone who wants to understand what's truly at stake with AI. Kevin Roose joins us this morning. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin Roose (2:02)

Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal (2:05)

Let's talk a little bit about the actual terminology here. People have obviously all heard AI.

Then we have AGI. How do you end up defining it for yourself?

Kevin Roose (2:16)

Yeah, it's the old notion of a general purpose model, which was distinct from what existed in AI even a decade ago, which was these very narrow models. They could play chess, they could play Go, they could translate languages, they could autocomplete the sentences in your email. But they couldn't do all of those things with the same model.

Now we have these giant general models, Gemini and Claude and ChatGBT, that are capable of doing hundreds, thousands of tasks just as well as a human. And AGI was the North Star of the AI industry and the research community. It's been a holy grail for generations of programmers. The idea that you could create a system that was as good as humans or maybe even much better than them at a broad range of tasks. So that is what AGI is, that is why all of these people got started and that's what they're trying to build.

Alexis Madrigal (3:12)

It's interesting though too, right? Because AGI had a little bit of this kind of like mystical, we will have created an other mind kind of thing, right? It was almost, it's almost I think come as a surprise to most researchers that they could have such confident models without necessarily knowing that they had created some other kind of being.

Kevin Roose (3:32)

Create? Totally. I mean, it is remarkable that when these people got started trying to build these general purpose models, talking about AGI was taboo. I mean, it would get you laughed out of the room in any academic machine learning research department.

And there was this little community of people in mostly in San Francisco, but also a few in London or Toronto who just kind of held on to this belief despite many, many people telling them they were crazy. And they became the pioneers who are leading some of the biggest AI companies and projects today. Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal (4:09)

You know, there's a set of critics of artificial intelligence who, you know, maybe use these tools at one point in the last, you know, say since 2023 And they think that the things don't work.

Well, how do you like, so when you encounter someone like that, who's sort of like, I don't use AI, it's just making stuff up all the time. It's a BS machine. Like, what do you say to them?

Kevin Roose (4:32)

I just tell them to try again, right? The models have changed a lot. And if you're a person who first used ChatGPT in 2022 or 2023, and that's where your oppression is coming from, you just need to kind of go back in and use one of the good models, right? There are a lot of pretty mediocre models out there. And usually if you're not paying for it, if you're just using the free versions, you're not getting the best horsepower on your models.