Kevin Roose is AGI-pilled. Why aren't you?

In this Decoder interview, Nilay Patel talks with journalist Kevin Roose about his new book The AGI Chronicles, which documents the race among frontier AI labs to build artificial general intelligence. Roose explains that the book began as an effort to preserve a historical record of the deep learning revolution, since the industry's Signal and Slack messages auto-delete and researchers are too busy to keep notes. He describes the moment AGI shifted from a distant dream to an operational goal, especially inside Google, where the transformer was invented in 2017 but never turned into a product before OpenAI did. Roose argues that belief in AGI is a double-edged sword: it makes founders neglect mundane business concerns, but it also drives the huge compute bets that have paid off, such as OpenAI's position today. He also discusses leaving The New York Times with Casey Newton to launch the video-first podcast Machine Gods, the small insular subculture of San Francisco AI researchers, and why the enterprise SaaS business is just the table stakes for continuing the frontier race. Roose says he is AGI-pilled, crediting his early experience with Bing's Sydney chatbot, while Patel remains skeptical, arguing that current systems are brittle at novel problem-solving that lacks objective verifiability.

(Source：The Verge)