Smash Notes

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

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. One day he noticed he was no longer treating these systems as an intellectual inferior. In some ways he was treating them as a peer, and that is when he thought something had changed.

Every time he has decided a model could not get any better, that this had to be the plateau, he has been wrong. He is trying to hold the predictions with some humility. The people who say scaling will continue indefinitely might be right. If they are, he wants to learn why they think that, and what to do about it. He also says it is possible he has what people call AI psychosis. When Nilay Patel asked, in this conversation, whether he was AGI-pilled, Roose said yes. Patel said he is not.

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 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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…
  7. 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.
  8. 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?
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

People

More answers like this

More with Nilay Patel

More with Kevin Roose

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.