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Back to Kevin Roose is AGI-pilled. Why aren't you?, with Kevin Roose.

What Is the Machine Gods Podcast?

Kevin Roose says Machine Gods, the show he and Casey Newton started after Hard Fork, is meant to be video first. They are going to care how it looks, and give people reasons to watch as well as listen. Some listeners do not want a video podcast, so the audio still has to be worth hearing on its own. His view is that you cannot make a podcast now without video on top of it, and they want a version as good as two middle-aged journalists can manage on YouTube.

Nilay Patel notes that the show is a partnership with NPR. The other reason Roose gives for the leap is the AI story itself: a platform shift, with new companies, new characters, and new ideas to talk about. Media formats usually change alongside the technology being covered. Here, he says, YouTube feels like the foundation that has stayed the most the same, even with Shorts and tests of a creator's own face.

Transcript

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

Decoder with Nilay Patel

More from this episode

  1. Why Did Kevin Roose Leave the New York Times?Kevin Roose left The New York Times, and left Hard Fork with Casey Newton, to build on YouTube.
  2. What Is AI Realism?Kevin Roose says AI realism, Casey Newton's phrase, is the stance of people who are resigned to AI or excited that it is not going away.
  3. Why Did Kevin Roose Write the AGI Chronicles?Kevin Roose wrote The AGI Chronicles because he was afraid the record of this era would vanish.
  4. Why Won't Sundar Pichai Say AGI?Kevin Roose says Sundar Pichai does not say AGI. Demis Hassabis does, and Sergey Brin does. Roose does not think the labs feel it equally.
  5. How Did OpenAI's Compute Bet Pay Off?Kevin Roose says the belief that led Sam Altman and his executives to bet, and maybe overbet, on compute last year is why OpenAI is in a better position than…
  6. How Wrong Was Dario Amodei's 2021 Plan for Anthropic?Kevin Roose says Dario Amodei's 2021 note, Vision for a New Co, written as Anthropic was starting, put a full AGI at about 10 billion dollars.
  7. Why Do AI Labs Keep Building If AGI Is Dangerous?Kevin Roose says he asked some version of this of the about 150 people he interviewed for The AGI Chronicles: if it is so dangerous, why are you doing it?
  8. Why Did Bing's Chatbot Sydney Feel Human?Kevin Roose says he never thought Sydney, the Bing chatbot, was alive, and he said so at the time.
  9. Will OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Become Trillion-dollar Companies?Kevin Roose says OpenAI will make it, Anthropic will make it, and Google will make it.
  10. Why Is Kevin Roose AGI-pilled?Kevin Roose says Sydney, the Bing chatbot, is what started to make him AGI-pilled. After that it was gradual.

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