Kevin Roose Didn’t Use AI to Write His Book About AI

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

Kevin Roose joins Katie Drummond to discuss his new book, The AGI Chronicles, which chronicles the intense race among OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to build

Key takeaways

• Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are launching Machine Gods Media after leaving The New York Times and Hard Fork to pursue independent coverage.
• Roose's book involved reporting on over 150 people, tracing how OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman to challenge Google, which later spawned Anthropic via Dario Amadei.

Main topics

• AI safety and governance
• independent media vs institutional journalism

Notable quotes

I feel sometimes like I am... in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1943.

Conclusion

The episode provides a grounded look at how AI is reshaping both techn

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan Speaker 2 (0:02) about Speaker 5 (0:02) how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Speaker 2 (0:11) Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it... are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes, and tracking the impact through the bottom line. Speaker 5 (0:31) There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. Speaker 5 (0:46) From Wired, this is The Big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. My guest today is longtime tech writer, reporter, and podcaster Kevin Roos. He's got a new book out this month called The AGI Chronicles, the inside story of the race to create an artificial superintelligence. For nine years, Kevin served as one of The New York Times' technology columnists, focused especially on tech's cultural and social impact on us mere mortals. Along with writer Casey Newton, Kevin launched the Hard Fork podcast in 2022. For four years, the duo covered everything from the collapse of FTX to the Trump family's largely unrealized 5G network to the myriad developments in AI and beyond. This summer, Kevin announced he'd be leaving both the New York Times and Hard Fork to start his own company with Casey. And their first project is a new podcast, Machine Gods, that bills itself as the official podcast of the singularity. Here's a clip from the trailer. Speaker 4 (1:43) After spending more than a decade covering Silicon Valley, Casey and I have become convinced that it's possible to reinvent talking from first principles. We've decided to start a new media company to give the world what it's really been missing. Men talking about AI. Speaker 5 (2:01) Kevin, thank you so much for being here. Speaker 4 (2:03) Katie, thank you for having me. Speaker 5 (2:04) So you and Casey recently announced that you were launching a new media company called Machine Gods Media. Not to be mistaken for your podcast of the same name minus the media. Machine Gods the podcast, Machine Gods Media the company, correct? Speaker 4 (2:19) Yeah, a name so nice we used it twice. There you go. So Speaker 5 (2:22) when you first announced that you'd be leaving The Times, you described your vision for what you wanted to do as one that, quote, takes AI progress seriously, is clear-eyed about the capabilities and risks of powerful AI systems, and tries to empower and entertain people in the face of radical uncertainty. I'm curious, as you look at sort of the landscape of tech coverage, of AI coverage, of AI podcasts, what's missing from the reporting and commentary that you and Casey... feel like you can address, that you want to address with the new show? Speaker 4 (2:53) We just feel like it was high time that two men had a place to talk about AI. Speaker 5 (2:58) I've been saying this for years. I want more men. Speaker 4 (3:01) Look, I think there are obviously no shortage of podcasts and YouTube shows and mainstream media coverage of AI. It's the biggest story in the world right now. But when Casey and I looked out at the media landscape, we saw some... issues. One was there are people who just are getting very famous and having a lot of success saying that all this AI stuff that's going on is fake. It's hype. It's a giant financial bubble. No one is using these tools. They're not going to have any impact on the economy. Open AI is going to go bankrupt. Anthropic is going to go bankrupt. Basically, this is sort of a genre of popular criticism. And it's not just a few people. I hear this from friends of mine who don't pay close attention to tech news and just assume that what's going on is just fleeting and trivial and that it will all sort of go back to normal soon. There's another genre of AI coverage that is purely hype. It's look at the, you know, the 17 amazing ways that Claude can supercharge your enterprise SaaS business. And you can go on LinkedIn and just see like example after example of people who are just purely excited about this technology and don't really care to talk about the risks. And we both just thought there's like a large gap in the middle for what Casey calls AI realism, which is basically this idea that you can take AI seriously, acknowledge that the tools are powerful and impressive, and in many cases, dangerous, and that you can help people understand that and demystify this area without sort of slipping into boosterism, and that you can also have a good time while you do it. We don't want this to be just a dour... take on AI doom. We want to actually give people a good experience and have a good time. Speaker 5 (4:48) I have to ask, the show you announced recently is being published in partnership with NPR. Why NPR? Why was that the right partner? Speaker 4 (4:56) A bunch of reasons. Both Casey and I are big fans of NPR. We like the fact that they have a broad, independent reach and mandate. We like the fact that they're going to let us own the show and make the creative decisions, and it will be a distribution partnership rather than a full acquisition, so we will still have some operating distance. We think this is a really critical... time and a really important story. And we like the idea that people might be in their cars, just listening to their local NPR member station and happen on our podcast. And maybe that's going to be someone who works in policy, or maybe that's going to be someone who is involved in local government. Maybe that's going to be someone who has a very different point of view on AI. We don't just want to have the sort of opt-in, self-selected tech audience listen to us. Speaker 5 (5:51) Now, I am going to ask you a crass question. A Bloomberg report recently said you both were fielding offers of up to $5 million for the show. I have to admit that link did travel through Wired Slack at rapid clip. Speaker 4 (6:07) It's a startling sum Speaker 5 (6:08) of money. Kevin, how much you making here? Speaker 4 (6:13) It's not $5 million. It's not. Is it more? Is it more? Speaker 5 (6:17) It's more than $5 million? Speaker 4 (6:19) So much more, Katie. So much more. I mean, look, they have made it, they made us a good offer. We could have gotten more money elsewhere. I mean, that's kind of Speaker 5 (6:29) what I was wondering. When I heard NPR, I thought to myself, there's no way NPR is giving those guys $5 million. With all due respect to NPR. Speaker 4 (6:37) It is not traditionally where people go to get rich in media is to public radio. They've made us a very good offer. We loved their new chief content officer, Nadine Zalstra. She's just a total force of nature, and we were very excited to work with her. And we just thought they had a lot of things to offer us beyond just money, like their distribution on radio. People don't realize how big radio still is. We've had this show, Hard Fork, for the last four years. We built up a pretty good-sized audience, but The Times owns that show, owns the feed. So we are looking to grow our show as quickly as possible, and we just thought that the combination of NPR's commitment to journalistic excellence, their wide distribution, and their investment in helping us grow the show was the right combination of factors. Speaker 5 (7:25) This brings me to one more question that I'm so curious about. The idea that... A great reporter, a great commentator can spend time somewhere that's sort of quote-unquote traditional like the New York Times. They can build a brand, and then they realize that they can just go do it themselves, and they don't actually need that institution anymore to exist in the world as talent and to make often a lot more money than they would in traditional media. I'm curious, what's your take on that? Speaker 4 (7:56) Look, I don't have anything bad to say about The New York Times. I had nine wonderful years there. It was my second stint at The Times. I've spent like the vast majority of my career at The New York Times and inside these big media institutions. I do think we are entering this moment where, at least for some portion of the audience, they want to connect with individuals more than institutions. We have just seen this wave after wave. I mean, I'm not doing this for ideological reasons. I'm doing this because I thought it was a really exciting opportunity. But I do think that organizations that want to retain and attract very talented people will just need to be more flexible about the kinds of arrangements. You know, some people aren't going to want to give up their substacks and go inside a media institution. Some people aren't going to want to sort of have all of their work. published by one publication. And so I think there are some media organizations that are starting to experiment with different, more flexible ways of bringing people in partway or having them sort of maintain their independent operation, but also contribute on an ongoing basis. I think there are a lot of ways this can work, but I think it all has to start from a recognition that like the journalistic career path where you like go in in the mail room. and you work your way up, and you spend 25 years at the same employer, and you eventually become an editor, and then a manager of editors. That has broken down. And that is regrettable. I don't think that's a good thing that it's broken down, but