Vergecast: Kevin Roose on the Origins of the AI Race and the Making of The AGI Chronicles

David Pierce of The Verge speaks with journalist and author Kevin Roose about his new book The AGI Chronicles, focusing on the early years of AI research before ChatGPT brought it into mainstream attention. The episode traces the rivalries, beliefs, and decisions that shaped the past decade of AI development, starting with a brief news roundup for October 27, 2026.

■ The AI Race and Its Origins
- Why Google's acquisition of DeepMind alarmed Elon Musk and helped spark OpenAI's creation
- How the transformer model, handed from Google researchers to OpenAI, marked the start of the closed-off race
- Google's internal chatbot Meena and the company's decision not to release it
- OpenAI's choice to launch ChatGPT despite internal doubts, and how scaling bets drove the industry forward

■ Beliefs and Debates Within the Field
- The worldview behind pursuing AGI, including ideas about human intelligence and computational functionalism
- The industry's approach to collecting training data and the discussions around compensating data producers
- Roose's own viral encounter with Bing's Sydney as an early public example of alignment issues in racing companies
- Competing definitions of AGI, and whether the term has any fixed meaning

■ Sponsor Segments and a Game Recommendation
- Ads for Jira by Atlassian, Bill, Outshift by Cisco, and Framer
- A walkthrough of the movie-building browser game Tentpole

For readers and listeners interested in AI history, tech industry dynamics, or Roose's book, the conversation offers context on how a small group of people arrived at the current state of AI, and how the choices made along the way were not predetermined.