Commonwealth Club Event: "Inside the Race to Artificial Superintelligence"

Join the Commonwealth Club of California on Oct. 19, 2026 to a discussion on Kevin Roose's new book, The AGI Chronicles.

HOW TO WATCH:
This event is $10 for online tickets, and you must register at the link below, at which point you'll be emailed a link to the online event - https://commonwealthclub.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket/#/instances/a0FVb00000HSfWHMA1

EVENT DESCRIPTION:
Imagine a 21st century Manhattan Project, tasked with creating artificial general intelligence.

That’s what a handful of AI companies have been racing to do over the past decade, seeking 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 reveals a behind-the-scenes account of the trillion-dollar sprint to create AGI in his new book The AGI Chronicles. Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history.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. Roose 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.

Join us to hear Kevin Roose reveal 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 SPEAKER & MODERATOR:

• Kevin Roose is a Technology Columnist at the The New York Times; Co-host for the "Hard Fork" Podcast; and author of Futureproof: 9 Rules in the Age of Automation (2021), as well as The AGI Chronicles: Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.
• Sebastian Mallaby, the Moderator, is a Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. He's also the author of The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (2026).

ABOUT THE EVENT HOST:
The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. Every year, they present more than 450 forums on topics ranging across politics, culture, society and the economy. Their stated mission is to be the leading national forum open to all for the impartial discussion of public issues important to the membership, community and nation. To learn more, go to: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/who-we-are
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