Transcript: 'The Inside Story of the 150 People Who Built Modern AI'

The transcript of The Every Podcast with journalist and author Kevin Roose is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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Timestamps

1. 00:00:00 Introduction
2. 00:02:23 Are we doomed? Roose on AI risk and the case for mandatory safety testing
3. 00:07:13 Why Roose raced to write the history of AGI before the records disappeared
4. 00:10:45 How Roose got 150 sources in a secretive industry to open up
5. 00:13:49 Dario Amodei’s “Big Blob of Compute” memo
6. 00:19:12 How Roose’s mother’s book on the survivors of the atomic bomb influenced his work
7. 00:21:40 The moment Roose first “felt the AGI”
8. 00:23:24 How a “council of Claudes” fact-checked Roose’s book
9. 00:31:59 Launching Machine Gods and reinventing video journalism
10. 00:41:41 Weightlifting versus forklifting: How Roose decides what to hand off to AI

Transcript