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AudioBook information:
Author: Kevin Roose
Narrated by: Kevin Roose
Release date: October 8, 2026
Audiobook Duration: 13 h 3 min
Summary: “Exciting and brilliantly reported . . . Roose makes the technology understandable while also conveying the historic nature of a new world being born.” —Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk
A New York Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of 2026
This is the story of the twenty-first century’s Manhattan Project: the race to create artificial general intelligence.
This program is read by the author.
For the last decade, a handful of AI companies have been racing to build the most powerful technology in history: artificial general intelligence, or AGI—a computer system capable of outdoing humans at almost anything. Some of them hoped AGI would cure diseases and heal the planet. Others feared it could kill everyone on Earth. They decided to build it anyway.
Kevin Roose’s The AGI Chronicles is the definitive, behind-the-scenes account of the trillion-dollar sprint to create AGI. Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history. He takes us inside the rooms where researchers watch large language models learn to talk, reason, and code at superhuman speed. He brings us to the White House, where top officials grapple with a technology that is improving too fast to understand, let alone regulate. He offers new details on the disagreements that led the founders of Anthropic to defect from OpenAI, and fresh reporting on Sam Altman’s dramatic firing—and equally dramatic reinstatement—as CEO. He gives us the inside story of Google’s frantic attempt to catch up to the AI frontier. And he ushers us into the San Francisco AI scene, where “accelerationists” in hacker houses and “doomers” at AI safety summits battle each other for supremacy.
With reportorial rigor and page-turning suspense, The AGI Chronicles reveals the true story of the most high-stakes technological quest in human history—an audacious attempt to create a new, alien form of intelligence that could either save humanity or destroy it.
Reviews:
“In this exciting and brilliantly reported book, Kevin Roose takes us behind the scenes of the secretive race to create artificial general intelligence. The AGI Chronicles is filled with drama and bitter rivalries, very colorful characters, and fascinating breakthroughs. Roose makes the technology understandable while also conveying the historic nature of a new world being born.” ―Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk and The Code Breaker
“By taking us inside the deeply human culture where AGI is being built, Kevin Roose brilliantly captures a truth I’ve long argued: AI is not an alien invasion, but a profound product of our own humanity. It is a tool we are creating from within ourselves to reach beyond our biological limitations. The AGI Chronicles provides the vital human context for the intelligence explosion ahead.” ―Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, and author of The Singularity Is Nearer
“[Roose] delivers a propulsive chronicle of the breakneck sprint to develop artificial general intelligence . . . Clear-eyed, deeply reported, and brisk, Roose’s account is an indispensable window into how the world arrived at a precarious technological inflection point.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Stuffed with head-spinning journeys into how AI/AGI models are constructed and trained . . . The best single explainer of how artificial intelligence came about, and what might happen next.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
About the Author:
Kevin Roose is an award-winning journalist and the bestselling author of three previous books: Futureproof, Young Money, and The Unlikely Disciple. From 2017 to 2026, he was the technology columnist for The New York Times, where he hosted the podcasts Hard Fork and Rabbit Hole. He is now the co-host, with Casey Newton, of Machine Gods, a podcast about artificial intelligence. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family.