The AGI Chronicles(编年史；纪事). By Kevin Roose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux(美国著名文学出版社); 448 pages; $33. Simon & Schuster; £25
《AGI编年史》。凯文·鲁斯著。法勒、斯特劳斯和吉鲁出版社；448页；33美元。西蒙与舒斯特出版社；25英镑。
To someone who has not witnessed the AI scene in California’s Bay Area(旧金山湾区), it is hard to convey how utterly(完全地，彻底地) weird it is. The Curve, a recent conference, hosted sessions including “What’s the plan for keeping robots under control?” and “The Neural Frontier: what happens when AI can read your mind?” People lounged on couches and in gazebos with cold brews and kombuchas discussing how AI company staff made obscenely rich by forthcoming public offerings should channel their philanthropic giving—even as some of them conspired to hobble their own employers to delay civilisational upheaval.(人们懒洋洋地靠在沙发上、坐在凉亭里，喝着冷萃咖啡和康普茶，讨论着因即将上市而暴富的AI公司员工应如何引导慈善捐赠——与此同时，其中一些人却在密谋阻挠自己的雇主，以推迟文明剧变。)
对于没有亲眼见过加州湾区人工智能圈子的人来说，很难传达它到底有多古怪。最近一场名为“曲线”的会议举办了多场分会，包括“控制机器人的计划是什么？”和“神经前沿：当AI能读你的心时会怎样？”人们懒洋洋地靠在沙发上、坐在凉亭里，喝着冷萃咖啡和康普茶，讨论着因即将到来的IPO而暴富的AI公司员工应该如何引导他们的慈善捐赠——与此同时，其中一些人却在密谋阻挠自己的雇主，以推迟文明剧变。
The goal of Kevin Roose, a former reporter for the New York Times, was not to write a grand treatise(论著，论文) on what AI means for the world but merely to record this weirdness before it was lost to the vagaries(变幻莫测，反复无常) of memory, disappearing message threads(消息线程，对话串) and obsolete(过时的，废弃的) media-storage formats. In “The AGI Chronicles” his focus is the nine years since Google researchers developed the transformer(Transformer模型（AI架构）), the type of AI model that underlies ChatGPT and all its kin. Quickly the idea took hold that, given enough data and computing power, transformer-based systems would eventually attain the holy grail: a truly “general” AI, or AGI, matching human smarts and then outstripping them.(很快，一种观念流行起来：只要有足够的数据和算力，基于Transformer的系统最终将获得圣杯——一种真正“通用”的AI，即AGI，先与人类智能匹敌，然后超越人类。)
凯文·鲁斯曾是《纽约时报》记者，他的目标不是写一部关于AI对世界意味着什么的宏大论著，而仅仅是记录下这种古怪，以免它被记忆的变幻莫测、消失的消息线程和过时的媒体存储格式所湮没。在《AGI编年史》中，他聚焦于谷歌研究人员开发出Transformer之后的九年——Transformer是ChatGPT及其所有同类产品所依赖的AI模型类型。很快，一种观念流行起来：只要有足够的数据和算力，基于Transformer的系统最终将获得圣杯——一种真正“通用”的AI，即AGI，先与人类智能匹敌，然后超越人类。