In 2024, artificial general intelligence researcher Andrej Karpathy coined the term “jagged intelligence” for AI. “What he meant,” writes Kevin Roose, “was that AI systems could be astonishingly brilliant in some ways and astonishingly dumb in others.”
Two years later, it’s hard to imagine more fortuitous timing for Roose’s The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence. As of this writing, tech headlines have been . . . disquieting. With swarms of rogue AI agents going on hacking sprees and frontier AI company leaders calling for a coordinated slowdown in the technology’s development, it seems the architects of machine intelligence are building something they don’t fully understand, faster than they can maintain control of it. Meanwhile, we ordinary mortals who have no idea what “recursive self-improvement” means are deeply interested in what’s going on in Silicon Valley’s AI labs.
As a former New York Times technology columnist, erstwhile co-host of the Times’ tech podcast “Hard Fork” and author of three previous books (including Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation), Roose is well placed to catch us up. With a podcaster’s flair for plain-English tech explainers and clarifying metaphors, he recounts the sweeping saga of how AI labs grew from careful and quixotic upstart research projects to corporate behemoths in a race with no definable finish line. He introduces key players with wildly variable visions: accelerationists urging a win-at-all-costs approach; doomers warning of human extinction; transhumanists who see AI as the next phase of evolution; philosophers hoping to train AI models to align with human values; cutthroat moguls with one eye on potentially vast IPOs and the other on their competitors; techno-mystics who dream of building a machine-god; and mutable combinations of these ideologies and drives within each person. Behind it all lurks the dream, the delusion or the specter (depending on whom you ask) of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a computer program that could surpass human capabilities across a broad range of tasks.
Will AGI be a new form of consciousness? Is it a fantasy, an imminent reality or already here? These are some of the big questions Roose tackles in The AGI Chronicles. A self-confessed optimist by nature, he seems both excited and concerned about the potential for AI to transform our world, but his storytelling style leans more toward fascination than fear. The result is an absorbing and accessible origin story of an astonishing, powerful technology that’s been imbued by its creators with the echoes of their own “jagged” human intelligence—unevenly brilliant and capable, not necessarily wise, sometimes deceptive and essentially unknowable.