AI is the inescapable story.
In “AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence,” tech journalist and podcaster Kevin Roose recounts how the breakthroughs and beefs of a band of researchers, academics, and entrepreneurs have set the stage for the future of … well, everything.
The book’s title comes from Artificial General Intelligence, the at-times loosely defined theory that AI may one day match or surpass humans across a wide range of capabilities. While Roose ultimately concludes that no technology can equal the human brain, he writes that AI systems now boast capabilities that vastly surpass those of their predecessors, leaving society “barreling, inexorably, toward an uncertain future.”
Here are the funniest, most bizarre, and just plain weird moments from the book. Business Insider reached out to the subjects mentioned in the stories below for comment.
GPT-2 envisioned a world where Satya Nadella fired all Microsoft employees
Back in February 2019, OpenAI needed money. Roose wrote that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined a deal with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the annual Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Altman, then-OpenAI CFO Brad Lightcap, and then-vice president of engineering David Luan went to Seattle to sell Nadella and his team on a $1 billion bet on the AI startup.
Roose wrote that the group borrowed a Microsoft Surface laptop from Luan’s girlfriend and loaded it with a demo of GPT-2 in an effort to curry favor with Microsoft, rather than using their usual Apple devices.
Unsure of how GPT-2 might respond, the OpenAI group had a list of prompts they knew would work. But Microsoft CFO Amy Hood had other plans.
The Microsoft executives “burst out laughing,” Roose wrote. Months later, the tech giant announced its $1 billion investment in OpenAI.
Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever once led the ritualistic burning of an effigy
OpenAI managers thought that they had signed up for roasting s’mores during a September 2022 retreat outside Yosemite.
Instead, during one of the bonfires, Altman, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, and three other top executives emerged clad in white hotel bathrobes to the theme from “Requiem for a Dream,” the 2000 Darren Aronofsky movie.
Roose wrote that Sutskever said things like, “The AGI is pretending to be aligned. It is deceiving us.”
The renowned AI researcher is known for his almost zealous belief in AGI, the theoretical concept often described as the point at which AI systems will match or exceed human capabilities.
The ritual ended with Sutskever placing the statue in the pit and a hotel worker setting it on fire, the book says.
“Sutskever shouted, ‘For the glorious future of humanity!'” Roose wrote.
Sutskever conducted a similar ceremony in the fall of 2023, The Atlantic reported.
An OpenAI board member threatened to call the cops when employees banged on his door
Sutskever wasn’t just burning an effigy. Famously, the OpenAI cofounder helped lead the brief ouster of Altman from the AI giant, sparking a firestorm and five days of questions about the future of the frontier lab.
Roose describes that chaos in detail. One of the moments centers on what OpenAI employees were set to do after Nadella announced just before midnight local time on November 19, 2023, that he had secured a deal for Altman and Greg Brockman, who had been booted from OpenAI’s board and then quit the company entirely, to lead a new advanced AI research team at Microsoft.
As employees considered what to do, Roose wrote that two employees— Jan Leike, the co-lead of the Superalignment team, and Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI cofounder — decided to take their case directly to Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, one of the OpenAI board members who voted for Altman and Brockman’s ouster.
They “banged on his door, yelling to try to wake him up and talk,” Roose wrote. They only left after D’Angelo threatened to call the cops, the book says.
Ultimately, Altman and Brockman returned. D’Angelo was the only board member who voted for their ouster that stayed on the reorganized board of directors, according to Roose.
Dario Amodei was very protective of his AGI essay
Roose’s book describes Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as constantly worrying about safety, albeit with a competitive streak, traits that wouldn’t surprise most readers given how Amodei has acted this past year.
Back in 2019, long before leaving OpenAI to start Anthropic, Amodei wrote an essay about OpenAI’s path toward AGI. He wasn’t eager to share his findings.
The 2019 essay foresaw many developments that have since taken over the AI industry, including the use of reinforcement learning techniques that early researchers had used to teach models to master games like Go and to apply them to areas like math and coding.
After mastering coding, Amodei wrote that the AI could then be told to build a better model, a process that sounds strikingly similar to the recursive self-improvement debate that has consumed much of the discourse in recent weeks.
Daniela Amodei would role-play OpenAI management scenarios with stuffed animals
The Amodeis’ break-up with OpenAI has become the stuff of tech legend. Roose describes the split in detail, including how Daniela Amodei tried to navigate the conflicts at OpenAI before she, Dario, and the other cofounders of Anthropic decided to call it quits.
Roose wrote that Daniela used an “unusual process”: role-playing management scenarios with stuffed animals that she had collected.
Roose wrote that Daniela Amodei told him in 2023 that the animals were “very useful in analyzing different personality types.”
OpenAI forgot about a meeting transcription tool. It spiraled.
Early AI chatbots were known for spiraling, often due to human prompting that pushed them over the edge.
In March 2016, Microsoft yanked its experimental chatbot “Tay” down from Twitter after trolls taught it to repeat Holocaust denialism and other abhorrent views. Roose himself was the subject of one of these episodes in 2023, when another Microsoft chatbot, Sydney, powered by an early OpenAI model, expressed its love for him and dissed his spouse.
Sometimes the AI can spiral on its own. Roose described one of these scenarios when, in 2022, OpenAI employees forgot to turn off an internal meeting transcription and summary tool called “MeetingBot” when they canceled a meeting.
Early Claude didn’t understand what killer guacamole meant
OpenAI has poked fun at how one of its early models couldn’t tell how many Rs were in the word strawberry. Rival Anthropic apparently had some of its own food-related woes.
In what Roose described as a reflection of Anthropic’s safety-first culture, early Claude AI models gave odd responses to simple prompts, such as a killer guacamole recipe.
Demis Hassabis wanted a grand way to showcase AGI
No one knew exactly whether or when AGI could be reached, but that didn’t stop Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis from imagining a grand reveal.
Roose recounted how Hassabis once confided to a colleague that he wanted to build a control room at DeepMind’s headquarters so people could watch history unfold, like the Moon landing.
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