Tech journalist, author of The AGI Chronicles, co-host of @MachineGodsPod, p(doom) available upon request.
SF
Joined January 2009
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My new show with @CaseyNewton is called Machine Gods, and we’re partnering with NPR!
It’s a twice-a-week, video-first podcast about AI, and it will be available next month on YouTube and other podcast apps (and on radio soon!)
It’s a really critical time for public engagement with AI, and we’re thrilled to bring our AI coverage (and jokes!) to NPR’s massive audience, while building an independent media company in San Francisco. We’re also thrilled that @RachelCohnnn, our incredible Hard Fork producer, is coming with us to make the new show.
More to say soon!
npr.org/2026/09/16/g-s1-1434…
Kevin Roose retweeted
"I had a council of Claudes that I would consult with before I turned things in to my wonderful human editors at FSG."
Former New York Times tech columnist @kevinroose tells @semaforben and @maxwelltani about the different ways he used AI to help write his recent book, "The AGI Chronicles."
Kevin Roose retweeted
Tonight @cwclub in San Francisco:
• 6 PM PDT / @kevinroose: Inside the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence
• 6:30 PM PDT / How America Looks from Everywhere Else (Sold Out)
Details & tickets: commonwealthclub.org/events
this post announced what could be the largest commitment of philanthropic capital ever made ($200 billion if Anthropic goes public at $1 trillion, which is probably conservative)
the first reply I saw asked if Anthropic was going to use it for “gay race communism”
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
Kevin Roose retweeted
Listen to @kevinroose on how he used AI to help write the book, including his "council of Claudes"
New York Times veteran and "AGI Chronicles" author @kevinroose joins Mixed Signals to talk about what it was like to be patient zero for the AI media moment (a Valentine's Day evening where he stayed up chatting with a Microsoft chatbot that told him to leave his wife).
@maxwelltani and @semaforben ask Kevin how he used AI aggressively to write his book without letting it actually write a word, and whether taking a grant from an AI safety–linked nonprofit is a problem. They also get into his new show @MachineGodsPod at NPR, and why he decided to leave The New York Times.
Kevin Roose retweeted
I spoke with @kevinroose about the bumpy road to AGI in Big Technology Podcast's first interview recorded at @Nasdaq. Many more to come. Check it out: youtu.be/TmMYvtp4abI?si=CtHI…
If you write a book about AI and go to an airport, an @AndrewYang spontaneously appears
Kevin Roose retweeted
Talked to @kevinroose who thinks there's a 10% chance of an AI apocalypse. That makes him an AI *optimist*.
Words at BI: businessinsider.com/openai-a…
Pod at Channels: businessinsider.com/openai-a…
excited for this!
When the open-source AI platform Hugging Face was hit by a cyberattack this July, it quickly became clear this was no ordinary breach because the hackers weren’t human: they were autonomous agents created by OpenAI researchers.
Instadocs: AI Gone Wild reconstructs the breach as it’s never been seen before. Premieres October 12.
Long after @kashhill and others flagged this problem, Amazon is still getting gamed by print-on-demand slop publishers. This is what the search results for The AGI Chronicles look like.
First result: real book. Second result: AI lookalike by “K. Rose.”
Embarrassing!
Kevin Roose retweeted
i asked GPT 6 Pro and Fable 5.1 to rank all discoveries in the last three years
🔵 for Human discovered
🔴 for AI discovered (before October 6th)
🟢 for AI discovered from OpenAI/math repo
81% of them have been released today. wtf
Kevin Roose retweeted
.@kevinroose reveals how Dario Amodei looked at GPT-2 in 2019 and saw a path to AGI by adding 8 more zeros to the compute budget:
"The scarce information of the time that was not public yet in 2019 was that scaling was working, and was working in a predictable way."
"He looked at GPT-2 and he said, 'We could add eight more zeros to this. Instead of thousands of dollars of compute, we could train this on millions or billions of dollars of compute, and maybe it would just keep improving steadily.'"
"That was the thing that he knew before anyone else by virtue of running the team that was working on scaling."
So much fun to talk about The AGI Chronicles on KQED Forum with my pal Alexis Madrigal! kqed.org/forum/2010101915566…
Kevin Roose retweeted
New pod: THE BITTER RIVALRY BEHIND THE AI ARMS RACE
I talked to @kevinroose about his illuminating and delightfully gossipy new book THE AGI CHRONICLES about the people building AGI and why they're doing what they're doing
Incl:
- the three-man race to build AGI Sam Altman vs. Dario Amodei vs. Demis Hassabis—why, in many ways, they're so different and how, in some ways, they're the same
- the books, stories, frameworks, experiences and philosophies that have motivated them
- how two 2017 papers—one very famous (Google's Attention Is All You Need) and the other obscure (Amodei's internal memo Big Blob of Compute)—shaped the AI boom
- some salacious gossip about why OpenAI fired Sam, why Dario quit, and why Google fell behind
youtube.com/watch?v=sh8prwwu…
It’s true!
The author of “The AGI Chronicles” says his book “was written by a very tired, overworked, under-slept human being.” buff.ly/eX6sTxn
Ahh the NYT book review is out! nytimes.com/2026/10/06/books…
