The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence
Date and Time:
Nov 12 2026 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location:
ON ZOOM

Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).

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Kevin Roose

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and co-host of the Machine Gods podcast

Kelly Leonard

Vice President, Creative Strategy, Innovation, and Business Development at The Second City

The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence

AI | Business | Digital Age | Ethics | Futurism | Innovation | Public Policy | Science | Technology

Book Giveaway: FAN is giving away copies of The AGI Chronicles to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.

For the last decade, a handful of AI companies have been racing to build what may be the most powerful technology in history: artificial general intelligence, a computer system capable of outdoing humans at almost anything. Some of the people building it hoped it would cure diseases and heal the planet. Others feared it could end humanity. They built it anyway.

In The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence, tech journalist Kevin Roose tells the story of this twenty-first-century Manhattan Project. Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, along with unpublished company documents, he takes readers into the rooms where researchers watched language models learn to talk, reason, and code, and into the White House, where officials struggled to govern a technology improving too fast to understand. He reports on the split that led Anthropic’s founders to leave OpenAI, Sam Altman’s firing and reinstatement, Google’s scramble to catch up, and the San Francisco scene where “accelerationists” and “doomers” battle over what comes next.

Roose is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and cohost, with Casey Newton, of Machine Gods, a podcast about AI made in partnership with NPR. He spent a decade as a technology columnist at the New York Times.

Roose will be in conversation with Kelly Leonard, Vice President of Creative Strategy, Innovation, and Business Development at The Second City in Chicago. He is the author of the acclaimed book Yes, And and hosts the popular podcast Getting to Yes, And for Second City Works and WGN radio.

This event is suitable for youth ages 12 and up. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER