The Inside Story of the 50 Who Built Modern AI With Kevin Roose

How did the race to build AGI really unfold, and who made the decisions that shaped it?

Tech journalist Kevin Roose interviewed 150 people at the center of the AI industry to find out. The result is The AGI Chronicles, a riveting account of  how modern AI was built and the choices that will determine what comes next. 

On this week’s episode of The Every Podcast, Natalia Quintero sits down with Roose to talk about how he got a secretive industry to open up, how he did (and didn’t) use AI in his book writing process, and why he sees his job as explaining the “very confusing and insular” world of Silicon Valley to everyone else.

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Follow Kevin Roose: https://x.com/kevinroose
• Get Kevin Roose’s book, The AGI Chronicles: https://theagichronicles.com/
• Machine Gods: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/g-s1-143588/machine-gods 
• “The Big Blob of Compute Hypothesis” excerpt on Kevin’s Substack: https://kevinroose.substack.com/p/the-essay-that-started-the-ai-race 
• Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke: https://www.amazon.com/Profiles-Future-Inquiry-Limits-Possible/dp/0575402776 
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/1451677618 
• NotebookLM: https://notebook.google/

Timestamps:

0:00 Introduction 
2:23 Are we doomed? Roose on AI risk and the case for mandatory safety testing
7:13 Why Roose raced to write the history of AGI before the records disappeared 
10:45 How Roose got 150 sources in a secretive industry to open up 
13:49 Dario Amodei’s “Big Blob of Compute” memo 
19:12 How Roose’s mother’s book on the survivors of the atomic bomb influenced his work
21:40 The moment Roose first “felt the AGI” 
23:24 How a “council of Claudes” fact-checked Roose’s book 
31:59 Launching Machine Gods and reinventing video journalism 
41:41 Weightlifting versus forklifting: How Roose decides what to hand off to AI