About this Event
Award-winning New York Times journalist, cohost of the hit tech podcast, Hard Fork, and bestselling author Kevin Roose joins Authors & Insights to launch his behind-the-scenes account of the trillion-dollar sprint to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) in his new book The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.
Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history.
Roose will be joined by Thomas L. Friedman, an internationally known author, reporter, and columnist. Friedman’s foreign affairs column in The New York Times, which he has written since 1995, reports on U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy, Middle East conflicts, international economics, environment, biodiversity, and energy. He has been with The New York Times since 1981. He is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes; and author of seven best-selling books.
An audience Q&A and reception will follow their conversation. Signed books will be available for purchase before and after the event. Seating and books are first come, first served.
WHEN: Tuesday, Oct. 6, at 6:30 p.m.
5:30 p.m. — Check-in opens
6:30 p.m. — Program begins
7:30 p.m. — Reception
8:30 p.m. — Event concludes
WHERE: Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center Theater
555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20001
CHECK IN:
• A photo ID is required for entry.
• Each attendee must have a ticket registered in their own name. If you reserved a ticket for someone else, please ensure their name and information are correctly entered.
• A printed ticket is not needed.
• Theater seating is first-come, first-served. Guests are encouraged to arrive early; overflow seating may be available.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
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 K*ll 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 Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history.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.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
is a series of in-depth conversations with compelling authors and thinkers exploring some of the most important issues of today. Click here to stay connected to all programming at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center.
ABOUT THE HOPKINS BLOOMBERG CENTER:
The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center pairs the power of 150 years of research leadership with a deep commitment to democracy and government partnership. We bring together academic experts, global leaders, policymakers, and the next generation of innovators to transform cutting-edge research into impact.
Event venue & nearby stays
Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, United States
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