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In his new book 'The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence,' journalist Kevin Roose contends that society is already experiencing the uneven, formative stage of artificial general intelligence rather than waiting for a future arrival. He outlines five key insights describing this transitional period as 'jagged,' marked by uneven progress across different capabilities and sectors.
Speaking at a conference in Abu Dhabi, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI has gone from being 'mostly not as smart' as leading scientists at the start of the year to now being 'mostly smarter' than them. He made the remark while arguing humans, not AI, should remain in control of the future.
Google introduced a new AI world model capable of simulating environments by generating not only video but also accompanying human voices. The company described the system as part of its broader effort toward understanding and simulating the world, which it frames as a key step toward artificial general intelligence.
Google DeepMind has released Genie 4, an upgraded world model that generates interactive virtual environments frame by frame from text prompts, now with audio support and more realistic human characters. The new version uses Gemini 3.8 Flash as a guiding agent to track goals and keep simulations consistent, though DeepMind says scenes still only hold together for a few minutes before losing context. Genie 4 also retains the ability to alter weather, add elements, or move the camera mid-simulation, as in Genie 3.
Kevin Roose has departed The New York Times and his podcast Hard Fork to co-found a new tech podcast, Machine Gods, alongside Casey Newton. The launch coincides with Roose's new book, The AGI Chronicles, which examines the companies racing to build artificial general intelligence. In a Decoder interview, Roose discussed the transition to independent media and his reporting on AI's biggest players.
DeepMind co-founder and Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis discussed his long-standing goal of developing artificial general intelligence, framing it as a foundational step toward solving broader scientific and societal problems. He traced his path from a childhood chess prodigy to AI researcher to Nobel laureate, describing his career as pursuing a consistent two-stage plan centered on intelligence first.
The writer, expecting his first child, reflects on Neil Postman's 1995 book The End of Education and historical predictions about technology replacing teachers, including Thomas Edison's 1913 claim that books would soon be obsolete. He revisits his own 2013 prediction that MOOCs would transform education and notes that institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have persisted for centuries despite shifting purposes.
Arm announced results showing its AGI CPU delivers nearly double the performance per rack compared to AMD's EPYC 9755, based on modeled rack calculations across seven agentic AI workloads. The figures came from a new CPU evaluation methodology Arm developed with input from Fujitsu, Meta, and OpenAI, and were independently verified by Signal65.
In The Verge's Installer newsletter, editor David Pierce highlights Kevin Roose's new book 'The AGI Chronicles' and previews 'Machine Gods,' a forthcoming podcast from Roose and Casey Newton expected to debut next week. The piece also features a look at Roose's phone homescreen and app choices.
Jacob Coxon, who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic for three years, announced his resignation from Anthropic on X. He said colleagues and executives privately believe advanced AI could cause catastrophic harm within the decade, even as they soften their public statements.
Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis spoke at the International AI Summit in Dublin, arguing that AI technology will help solve climate change. He also referenced Google's new Gemini 4 Argon model and distinguished AI's strong performance in math, coding and games from its more limited role in physical sciences like physics and biology, which he said require human creativity and real-world experimentation.
Google has introduced Gemini 4 Argon, a model built for physical and spatial reasoning tasks used in robotics. The company says Argon scored 87% on the Embodied Reasoning benchmark, which tests understanding of physical and spatial problems in 3D environments, surpassing other leading models. Google outlined uses spanning robot control, simulation-to-reality reconstruction, physical understanding, and self-improvement, including a demo of a Boston Dynamics Spot robot practicing a trash-disposal task in a MuJoCo simulation before performing it physically.