I’ve known former New York Times reporter Kevin Roose since 2017, when we rode a bus into the California desert to try out Waymo’s early driverless cars. Now he has a new book called The AGI Chronicles about the rise of today’s leading AI labs. He also just launched a podcast with Casey Newton called Machine Gods that’s all about AI.
In this episode we talked about how AGI went from a fringe belief that could get researchers ostracized to the organizing goal of an entire industry. Google invented the transformer and had the talent and compute to commercialize it. But it was held back by fear of cannibalizing its own products — and a culture that treated AGI as an embarrassment. OpenAI made a big bet on scaling Google’s invention and created a new industry.
Kevin believes we’ve already arrived at AGI and that the labs are close to automating their own research. I’m more skeptical: automating one part of a process tends to shift the bottleneck elsewhere, so I expect a transition measured in years rather than months. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Today’s episode is sponsored by the 80,000 Hours podcast. The average person works 2,000 hours per year, and a typical career lasts 40 years. That means that many of us will spend about 80,000 hours working over the course of our lives, and it's worth putting some thought into how to put that time to good use. I expect my listeners in particular will enjoy the 80,000 Hours podcast, which focuses heavily on AI-related careers. The hosts believe the world is on the verge of an AI-driven transformation, and so they've interviewed a lot of people who have been influential in the AI world. These include past AI Summer guests Jasmine Sun and Ajeya Cotra, as well as former AI Summer cohost Dean Bell. Please check it out.
