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

My guest today is Kevin Roose, a journalist and author of the new book The AGI Chronicles. 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 TImes to being an independent creator, and then of course we talked about the book, which is excellently reported dive into the companies racing to build machine intelligence. #agi #ai #tech #openai #anthropic 0:00 Cold Open: Is Sydney Alive? 0:55 Welcome to Decoder 1:51 Kevin Roose & Machine Gods 2:54 Leaving The New York Times 8:18 Life as an Independent Creator 12:13 Reporting The AGI Chronicles 14:52 The Moment AGI Became Real 17:41 Can LLMs Reach AGI? 20:44 Google's AGI Memo Wars 25:37 The Blip: OpenAI Becomes a Business 29:23 Are the Leaders Ready? 32:13 Why They Keep Racing 36:55 Google vs. OpenAI 40:38 The Bing/Sydney Story 46:36 The SF AI Party Scene 50:47 Can the Companies Handle It? 55:26 Are You AGI-Pilled? 1:01:27 AI as Religion 1:03:17 Outro Subscribe: http://goo.gl/G5RXGs Like The Verge on Facebook: https://goo.gl/2P1aGc Follow on Twitter: https://goo.gl/XTWX61 Follow on Instagram: https://goo.gl/7ZeLvX Follow on TikTok: http://bit.ly/42VeCVU Watch The Vergecast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/40RFRkg The Vergecast Podcast: https://bit.ly/3WQDexZ Decoder with Nilay Patel: http://apple.co/3v29nDc More about our podcasts: https://www.theverge.com/podcasts Read More: http://www.theverge.com Community guidelines: http://bit.ly/2D0hlAv Wallpapers from The Verge: https://bit.ly/2xQXYJr Shop our Verge merch store here: https://bit.ly/4kPCmEc If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may receive a commission without exerting any influence on editorial content. For more information about our ethics policy, visit: https://bit.ly/3ZWTlLs