Sam Harris speaks with Kevin Roose about the race to build artificial general intelligence. They discuss Roose's book The AGI Chronicles, the scaling laws behind AI's rapid progress, Dario Amodei's "big blob of compute" memo, the birth of reasoning models, Roose's encounter with Bing's Sydney chatbot, the roughly 50 people deciding humanity's future, the rivalries among lab leaders, AI agents and recursive self-improvement, the absence of regulation, and other topics.

Kevin Roose is an award-winning technology journalist and the author of four books, most recently The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence. He is the host of the NPR podcast Machine Gods. From 2017 to 2026, he was a technology columnist at The New York Times, where he co-hosted the podcast Hard Fork with Casey Newton and hosted the series Rabbit Hole. His work examines artificial intelligence, automation, social media, and the effects of technology on society.

Website: MachineGods.fm

X: @kevinroose