The Bitter Rivalries Behind the Race to Build Superintelligence

Derek Thompson (0:05)

Today, understanding the people who are building superintelligence. I want you to think back to 2017 In some ways, it probably just feels like yesterday. Nine years ago, your neighborhood probably looked exactly the same. There were cars, coffee shops, phone in your pocket. But in the history of artificial intelligence, 2017 is the distant past. ChatGPT doesn't exist. Anthropic doesn't exist. The mega project of AI construction that's currently driving American economic growth, it was on nobody's horizon. But the following things all happened in 2017

Number one, OpenAI, the nonprofit co-founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, started work on GPT-1. Five years later, this technology would serve as the guts of ChatGPT. Also in 2017, a physicist at OpenAI named Dario Amodei wrote a secret 26-page internal memo entitled Big Blob of Compute, in which he made the argument that AI research should resemble a massive infrastructure project, where bigger models with more data using more chips would be the path to superintelligence. Nine years later, this thesis has proved eerily accurate as the entire AI buildout has been motivated by the idea that AI's capabilities scale with compute spending. And number three, also in 2017, AlphaGo, an AI model, went undefeated against the world's top-ranked Go player. The model came from the company Google DeepMind, run by Demis Hassabis. Three years later, that company would use similar technology to solve the famous protein folding problem, an achievement that many scientists considered impossible. For this, Hassabis would win the Nobel Prize.

Nine years later, it is not a stretch to argue that the entire frontier of AI has been shaped by these three men, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Dario Amodei, now the CEO of Anthropic, and Demis Hassabis, now chief scientist at Alphabet.

But who are these men? Who are Sam, Dario, and Demis? I'll sometimes read or hear coverage of the space that makes it sound like the men building advanced AI are all the same. They all want the same things, they are powered by the same greedy motivation. But these men are not the same. In today's episode is about the hidden motivations and rivalries among these three men that have arguably brought us to the precipice of superintelligence. What books and ideas inspired them when they were young? What do they fear? What do they really want?

My guest is Kevin Roose, the author of a new book, The AGI Chronicles, the inside story of the race to create an artificial superintelligence. This is a story of bitter rivalries and secret documents, and a technology moving faster than the people building it can understand, let alone control.

I'm Derek Thompson.

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Kevin Roose (4:58)

Thank you for having me back. Always a pleasure.

Derek Thompson (5:00)

Kevin, what is superintelligence? And why do you think we're on the precipice of building it?

Kevin Roose (5:06)

Superintelligence, you could think of as an AI system that is smarter than everyone at everything.

There are sort of these gradations of AI capabilities. People talk about AGI, artificial general intelligence, as a computer program that is human level or better at most tasks, or most intellectual tasks. Superintelligence would be the level beyond that where we have something that is vastly smarter than us at everything that we could conceivably do.

Derek Thompson (5:36)

Your new book is called The AGI Chronicles, the inside story of the race to create an artificial superintelligence. It seems from your reporting that you think this is a race that is on the precipice of achieving something quite dramatic in the near future. What have you seen, let's just say in the last 12 months, that have made you think we were really making progress toward this goal as you defined it?