The AGI Chronicles

Name: The AGI Chronicles
Brand: Simon & Schuster UK
Price: 29.75 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence

By: Kevin Roose

Write A Review

Paperback | 27 October 2026

At a Glance

Format
Paperback

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.3 x 2.7

Paperback

RRP $36.99

$29.75

20%OFF

or 4 interest-free payments of $7.44 with

Available: 27th October 2026

Preorder. Will ship when available.

‘Exciting and brilliantly reported’ Walter Isaacson

This is the story of the twenty-first century’s Manhattan Project: the trillion-dollar sprint to create artificial general intelligence.

For the last decade, a handful of companies have been racing to build the most powerful technology in history: artificial general intelligence (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.

Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Kevin Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history. With reportorial rigor and page-turning suspense, 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 charts 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.

More than a billion people now use AI every day, yet almost nobody knows how it was created. The AGI Chronicles is the definitive, behind-the-scenes account of how an obscure research project became the defining technology of our age.

Industry Reviews

‘In this exciting and brilliantly reported book, Kevin Roose takes us behind the scenes of the secretive race to create artificial general intelligence. It’s filled with drama and bitter rivalries, very colorful characters and fascinating breakthroughs. He makes the technology understandable while also conveying the historic nature of a new world being born’

– Walter Isaacson

‘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, Author of The Singularity Is Nearer

Shipping

	Standard Shipping	Express Shipping
Metro postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Regional postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Rural postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95

Orders over $0.00 qualify for free shipping.

How to return your order

At Booktopia, we offer hassle-free returns in accordance with our returns policy. If you wish to return an item, please get in touch with Booktopia Customer Care.

Additional postage charges may be applicable.