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

In this Decoder interview, Kevin Roose discusses leaving The New York Times with Casey Newton to launch the video-first podcast Machine Gods, and his new book The AGI Chronicles, a reported history of the frontier labs racing to build artificial general intelligence. He describes how the transformer gave companies a tool for a long-held dream, how labs differ in how "AGI-pilled" they are (with Anthropic most and Google least), and how belief in AGI drives both bet-the-farm compute spending and a struggle to focus on business fundamentals.