Kevin Roose is AGI-pilled. Why aren’t you?

Today, I’m talking to Kevin Roose, journalist and author of the new book The AGI Chronicles, which details the recent and explosive transformation of the AI industry. Kevin was a longtime New York Times reporter and host of the popular podcast Hard Fork, but he and friend of the show Casey Newton just left the Times to start the all-new tech podcast Machine Gods, which launched last week. Kevin and I talked about launching Machine Gods and what it’s like to go from The New York Times to being an independent creator — and then of course we talked about the book, which is an excellently reported dive into the companies racing to build artificial general intelligence. I wanted to get a sense from Kevin of what it was like to report this, to try and understand these characters and this moment in time, and where it all goes next. Fair warning: This conversation takes a pretty philosophical turn at the end, but I think you’ll find it a really worthwhile back-and-forth. Okay: Kevin Roose on The AGI Chronicles, starting Machine Gods, and where AI goes from here. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Kevin Roose, you are the author of The AGI Chronicles and the cofounder and co-host of the new podcast Machine Gods. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks so much for having me. I was listening to the first episode of Machine Gods and you and Casey discussed the fact that technically you have the title of CEO. It’s true. I won the coin flip and we needed someone. When you start a company as we have, you need to list someone as the CEO, I guess, to know who to haul in front of Congress when our first scandal inevitably breaks. So that’s going to be me. It’s funny because you’re a CEO on Decoder. It means I’m going to have to ask you the Decoder questions. [Laughs] Okay. Well, I’ve been a CEO for about five minutes and most days I frankly forget I’m the CEO. Honestly, that tracks with most of the CEOs on the show. They all act like they’ve only done it for five minutes. We’ll come to it. I want to talk about your book. It’s called The AGI Chronicles. It is a meticulously reported book about the main frontier labs and the culture shift they’ve all undergone as AI has come into the forefront and become a much more commercial product in many ways. But let’s just start with Machine Gods. You were a journalist for The New York Times for a long time. Obviously, I think the audience probably knows this, but you and I have known each other for a long time. I will say that since I have known you, your desire to be a YouTuber has been top of mind. You’re just like, “How do I get over there?” And I’ve always been like, “Run, don’t do it.” But you did it. You left The Times, you started your own podcast with our friend Casey Newton. It is the next generation of the very popular podcast, Hard Fork, which was excellent. And I’m excited for you, but what made you take the leap? Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. Yeah, you have been trying to convince me out of this for as long as I’ve been trying to convince myself into it and you have not succeeded because here I am. Yep, I failed. Utterly failed. No, look, I think that for some very good reasons, media companies have long been a little bit wary of going all in on YouTube or any other video platform. The ones that have gone all in have not necessarily come out of that with good feelings about it because there are a lot of– Yeah, they pivot to video and also into death, routinely. Yeah, you pivot to video or you sort of waste a bunch of money doing things that don’t pay for themselves. So, I think there are some structural economic reasons for that, but I also think it’s that there aren’t a lot of institutions that are equipped to make that kind of a long-term bet. I’ve been trying to YouTube-pill people in media for many years, as you know. You’ve been trying to undo the YouTube-pilling on your end, but I just think it’s clearly the most important media platform in the world right now. It’s a place where journalism has not historically had a central place. If you were to look at YouTube as a whole and try to assess what piece of it is dedicated to what you or I would consider high-quality journalism, it’s a vanishingly small part of the overall ecosystem there. So, part of my mission is just to crack that and figure out how to do YouTube and video in general in a way that is sustainable from an economic and a sort of creative standpoint. And then just to experiment and do a bunch of things. This is not a face that needs to be on YouTube. So I’m also hoping to bring some other people in and nail some formats. But I look at what The Verge has done there. I look at what people like Joanna Stern and MKBHD have done there. To me, that is very exciting and it’s a space where there’s a lot less competition than text or podcasts. Machine Gods is a podcast that you’re doing in partnership with NPR, which I want to talk about. But do you think of it as a YouTube product? We want it to be video-first. What that means basically is that we are going to give a shit about what it looks like to a degree that we have not always done. We’re going to try to give people a lot of reasons to want to watch as well as listen. Obviously, we know that there are some people who just don’t like video podcasts and so we want to give the audio audience something that is enjoyable, but this is the direction of things. You can’t do a podcast now without doing video on top of it. So we’re going to try to really embrace that and make a good version of it that is as good as two middle-aged journalists can pull off on YouTube. Truly the future of media is middle-aged journalists pivoting to YouTube. I feel the same way because I’m now making more video and that’s what we’re doing. It’s going to be great. The other reason to leave and to do this — and obviously people know I’m friends with Casey as well, and I’ve been talking to you and him about it for a long time — is that the AI story is here. There is a platform shift. There are new companies, new characters, new ideas to talk about in the world. It’s funny because in that context, usually you get a media shift as well. The way we tell stories or the formats we tell stories usually shifts alongside the thing we are talking about or the technology we’re talking about. Here, YouTube feels like the most solid media foundation that exists. It’s the one that’s the same the most, even though it’s changing and it has YouTube Shorts and now you can A/B test everything, including your own face. But it’s the one that is the most the same. Instagram has undergone some massive change and it feels like that will continue happening. Does it feel like YouTube is the most stable place to build as you’re trying to tell these new stories? It does. I mean, obviously you never want to put all your eggs in one basket. So, we are also distributing video on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we’re going to be everywhere. But yeah, it feels relatively stable. The question I’m always wondering is what would it take to replace YouTube? Many companies have tried to replace YouTube, but to do that, you would not only have to build an experience that was better for creators and better for users, but you would also have to replicate the entire visual corpus of humanity. You would have to just get six million videos from plumbers about how to fix every individual sink and then upload it to that. It’s a really hard thing to displace. It is so ingrained for so many people, and I just think it’s going to keep growing. We’ll come to this when we talk about AI, but a long time ago I asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai, “Well, what are you going to do if there’s no more websites?” And he was kind of like, “Well, we have YouTube.” And there’s just no arguing with that. You sure do. And it is just going to keep growing. What has been the most surprising thing about going from The New York Times to what you might call the creator economy? Well, we’re very new at it, but surprising to me so far is how much I like all the business stuff. I think in journalism, you’re always taught to stay in your lane, and I have never run a business before. Casey has run a business. I knew he enjoyed it. But for me, these are new muscles and I don’t enjoy all of it. Negotiating the insurance quotes for our defamation coverage is not what I would feel compelled by. But regarding actually running a business, there is something to this founder thing. Yeah, it’s a good time. It’s funny, in talking to you and to Casey and Joanna, who also just left and started her own thing, that comes up a lot. From my perspective, it’s why I’ve been doing this a long time. What if I stopped running the business? That doesn’t seem to be a choice. This is the future of media — taking control of your business and taking control of your audience. There’s something very powerful there. One of the things I want to talk about, and then I definitely want to talk about the book at length, is the audience for AI coverage, because I see it in two ways. There’s a group of people building the stuff that loves it and wants to consume all of it. There’s a group of people that truly hates it and thinks all of it is fake. And then there’s what I would call an expanding group in the middle where the products have become more useful. You have to look at them and evaluate them as they are. They were not terribly useful a couple years ago. The promises did not match reality, but every day now it can do one more thing that it couldn’t do before. Whether that thing is hacking all of the websites in the world, we’ll set that aside, but AI can do things it couldn’t do before and the audience seems to be changing. How are you thinking about the audience for Machine Gods and how it might grow or change? I mean, right now we’re just trying a bunch of stuff that we think will be good and we hope that it will find its sort of natural audience. But I think you’re right that the audience is changing. I think for a while there was a lot of demand for cope — basically people telling you this is not happening, you don’t have to pay attention to it, it sucks, it’s hurting the environment. There still is in some parts of the internet. YouTube has a weird amount of this still going on and Reddit is also very anti-AI. But I think most people, or at least maybe a plurality of people, are either resigned to or excited about the fact that this is not going away. That is the audience that we’re looking for. We’re not trying to tell you that AI is amazing and we’re going to be in AI utopia under the new machine regime. We’re also not telling you that this stuff is fake and sucks and is going to go away on its own and so we don’t need to do anything to regulate it or be worried about it. Casey’s phrase for this is AI realism. He thinks there’s a big chunk of people who are just sort of curious and interested and maybe a little scared, but their reaction to the fear is not to try to bury their heads in the sand, but to try to understand the thing. So we started feeling this when we were doing Hard Fork where we would do something that just seemed kind of not our vibe. We would do a Claude Code walkthrough tutorial where we would just spend half an hour building a website and film ourselves and throw it up and it would do great. So people clearly were curious, and even if the comments on the videos were all from people who hated AI, there was clearly a lot of demand out there for people who were just like, “I kind of want to know what’s going on.” “I hate that I can’t stop watching this” is a real theme inside of AI coverage for a variety of reasons. Let’s talk about the book. I think that’s going to frame a bunch of the other questions I have. The book is meticulously reported. It is really fun to read. And the point of it, as I’ve heard you describe it, is to tell the history of the deep learning revolution because all these people just talk in Signal and in extremely childish tweets. Tell me about that gap because this is an industry that is obsessed with documenting itself for computers and being legible to computers and not at all to other people, which seems wild to me. So explain the reporting of this book, because it feels like convincing them to even tell you what happened was a slog. It was, yeah. So basically the reason I wrote this is because I was scared that all of this stuff was going to disappear. I am a history buff. I love to read books about the Wright brothers or the electrification of rural America or the moments of great invention during the PC revolution. I’m such a sucker for that stuff. What you notice as you read more of these books is just that they all rely on a lot of contemporaneous notes and evidence — the lab notes from the scientists developing the atomic bomb, the correspondence between the Wright brothers and their friends and business partners — that is preserved and archived. It was just clear to me reporting on AI every day that there was not going to be anything remotely similar for this stuff because A, all the people building this stuff work for private companies. They’re not government employees who are legally required to preserve their correspondence. And B, the Signal messages and Slack messages are all set by the lawyers to auto-delete after a certain period. So there was literally going to be kind of a mass disappearance with each passing year of these, I think, historically important artifacts, moments, and stories. And then C, the researchers are all too busy to keep notes. They’re all grinding because they’re trying to build the machine god. So, I thought as a journalist, but more so almost as a historian, which is not a role I’ve ever officially played, but one I think I was playing with this book. I was just like, “I’ve got to just get this stuff because I have this sort of privileged ringside seat. These people talk to me. I know some of them will sit down and talk to me and tell me the stories.” We did a lot of it on background so they could be protected from the consequences of talking to me. But this was sort of my attempt to furiously get all the stuff and put it in the archive where future generations could look at it. The theme that really jumps out at me as I read the book was there’s a moment when AGI goes from being a thing they’re all dreaming about to being a thing that they all have to build and the shackles come off and they say, “We have to do this,” and they all drive toward it as hard as they can. You talk specifically about Google where the Overton window moved and suddenly the people inside of Google, who thought this was all a pipe dream and pretty silly, started talking about AGI. That moment feels like the single most important moment in the history of AI, where “Won’t it be great?”