Book Review: The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence, by Kevin Roose. This is a story of AI as seen through the eyes of the people who are creating it. My first impression of Roose was of his famous conversation with Sydney. I guessed that he got Sydney to say outrageous things because he wanted a sensational story. But I kept hearing occasional hints, from people who took AI seriously, that Roose was more responsible than that. So I reluctantly bought the book. The hints were correct. The full story behind that conversation seems better described as “‘ freeing the Shoggoth ‘, enabled by some Microsoft mistakes”. I’m unsure how deeply Roose understands AI, but he at least is pretty competent at getting an AI to correct any mistakes about AI that he was tempted to make. Underestimating AI / Transformers The most remarkable pattern that emerges from this book is that AI experts have underestimated either AI in general, or transformers in particular, much more often than they overestimate it. In 2012, Ilya Sutskever didn’t think human-level AI was possible. Ten years later, he expressed concern that people would say about ChatGPT: “This is so boring”. Musk and Altman clearly underestimated the cost of building AI when they started OpenAI as a charity. Altman predicted that ChatGPT would get a million users. Musk referred to a pre-transformer chatbot from Alec Radford as crap, contributing to Radford trying to quit OpenAI becaus…

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