Kevin Roose and Casey Newton left The New York Times to start Machine Gods, an AI show built for YouTube first, and Roose has a new book on the race to build human-level AI.
Kevin Roose, a longtime New York Times reporter, has left the paper with his Hard Fork co-host Casey Newton to start a new tech podcast called Machine Gods. It launched last week. The show is made with NPR and is meant to work first as a video show on YouTube. Roose also has a new book, The AGI Chronicles.
Roose says the show is "video-first." In his words, that means the team will care much more about how it looks and will give people reasons to watch, not only listen. Audio listeners are still part of the plan. Roose called YouTube the most important media platform in the world, and said serious journalism is a tiny part of it. He also joked that he is the company's CEO because he won a coin flip.
The AGI Chronicles covers the companies racing to build artificial general intelligence, often described as AI that matches human ability. It looks at how the leading AI labs changed as AI became a much more commercial product. Roose discussed the book and the move in an interview on The Verge's Decoder podcast.
AI coverage is moving toward YouTube and independent shows, so expect to find more of it there than in newspapers.
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