Kevin Roose leaves The New York Times and launches AI show Machine Gods

In short: Journalist Kevin Roose has left The New York Times, released a new AI book, and started a new show that is built for YouTube.

What's going on

Kevin Roose, a longtime New York Times reporter and co-host of the tech podcast Hard Fork, has started a new podcast called Machine Gods with journalist Casey Newton. Roose talked about the move in a new interview on Decoder, a podcast from The Verge.

Roose said the new show is “video-first,” meaning it is designed to be watched on platforms like YouTube, not only listened to as audio. He argued that YouTube is now the biggest and most stable place to build an audience, even though many news organizations have been cautious about betting heavily on video.

The conversation also focused on Roose’s new book, The AGI Chronicles. The book reports on the companies trying to build “AGI,” short for artificial general intelligence, which is the idea of an AI system that can do many kinds of tasks at a human level. Roose said he wanted to capture this period like a historian, because many important discussions inside AI companies happen in chat apps that delete messages automatically.

What to watch

More well-known journalists may follow this path, leaving large media companies to run independent, YouTube-centered shows. Roose and Patel also suggested that public interest in AI is shifting. More people now want practical explanations of what AI can do, rather than either cheering it on or rejecting it outright.

Source: The Verge AI