‘Nothing About This Was Inevitable’

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. [ Read: The singularity is not what it seems ] 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.