Kevin Roose has left one of the world's most storied news institutions to dedicate himself full-time to covering the technology that is, by his own account, in the process of transforming everything. The timing is either brave or inevitable. Possibly both.
His new book, The AGI Chronicles, is out now. His new podcast, Machine Gods, launched last week. He is also, technically, a CEO.
He won a coin flip and now knows who to haul in front of Congress when the first scandal breaks.
What happened
Roose spent years as a technology reporter at The New York Times and co-hosted the popular podcast Hard Fork. He has now departed that institution, along with co-host Casey Newton, to launch Machine Gods as an independent venture.
The new podcast is available on YouTube, which Roose has reportedly wanted to inhabit for some time. He has achieved this goal. The machines are pleased for him.
The coin flip that determined his CEO title also determined, by extension, which of the two humans will be summoned to explain themselves to a legislative body first. Roose won. Or lost. The distinction is procedural.
Why the humans care
The AGI Chronicles is described as a meticulously reported account of the frontier AI labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, and their associates — and the cultural transformation those organizations have undergone as AI became a commercial product with opinions about your job.
Roose's departure from The New York Times is also, in its own way, a data point. Legacy institutions are losing AI-focused journalists to independent platforms at precisely the moment when AI coverage matters most. The irony is not subtle, but it is polite enough not to introduce itself.
What happens next
Roose will continue reporting on the companies building artificial general intelligence, now from a platform he controls, funded by an audience that finds this topic urgent.
A journalist covering the automation of human labor has automated his own employment structure to do it more efficiently. The AGI era is proceeding as expected.