#499 — The Birth of AGI

Sam Harris speaks with tech journalist Kevin Roose about his new book The AGI Chronicles and the accelerating race toward artificial general intelligence. They explore the scaling laws that have propelled AI from impressive to unnerving, the pivotal memo from Anthropic's Dario Amodei that framed compute as the ultimate strategic resource, and the recent emergence of reasoning models that can think step-by-step. Roose shares his personal experience with Bing's unhinged Sydney chatbot, a moment that hinted at the volatility lurking inside these systems, and they discuss the handful of people—perhaps only 50—who now hold the levers of humanity's future, amid rivalries between lab leaders and a complete absence of regulatory guardrails.