Kevin Roose has been explaining artificial intelligence to normies for many years. From his almost decade-long perch as a business-and-technology columnist and host of the podcast Hard Fork at the New York Times, he often served as an early-warning system for readers, alerting them to the potential of technologies like ChatGPT — or, more often, to their pitfalls. (His 2023 column recounting how Bing’s chatbot, Sydney, attempted to break up his marriage introduced many people to AI “hallucinations”.)

Roose recently left the Times, and will now start an AI-focused podcast with Hard Fork co-host Casey Newton, write for The Atlantic, and pursue other ventures. On Tuesday, he published his fourth book, The AGI Chronicles, which tells the tale of the AI arms race of the 2010s and 2020s. Drawing on a deep well of reporting, Roose chronicles the seismic technological breakthroughs that paved the way for our current moment, illustrating how these systems actually work in language comprehensible to lay readers — and what their rapid improvement could mean for humanity’s future. He also portrays the cutthroat competition and bitter rivalries that have defined the AI boom, among now-household names like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, as well as lesser-known but key figures in the industry’s once-insular world.

I spoke with Roose recently about why he’s more sanguine about AI than he used to be, how the technology is and isn’t like nuclear weapons, and OpenAI’s dubious reputation.

You make an analogy in the book that living in San Francisco the past few years has been a bit like living in Los Alamos when the Manhattan Project rolled into town. But Los Alamos was purpose-built by the government, and the Manhattan Project existed for a very specific public-minded aim — winning World War II. The AI boom, on the other hand, is driven by private enterprise, by some of the most valuable companies in the world. And the reason it’s being built is mostly because it can be. I’m wondering how you think the way this technology came to be is affecting its perception among the American public, who are already so skeptical of the tech industry.There are major differences, one of them being that we have a lot more AI billboards here in San Francisco than I think they had in Los Alamos In the ’40s [laughs]. So you’re right: Unlike not only the Manhattan Project but every previous era of major technological innovation, this one is being done entirely in the private sector and by a very small number of people.

The AI industry now seems big enough that you could think of it almost as a stand-in for the tech industry, which obviously includes millions of people. But all of the key decisions have been made by, I would say, no more than a couple hundred people, and probably even fewer than that. I think it’s quite important to understand those couple hundred people, so I tried to talk to all of them, and I ended up talking to most of them. And some of them see this work as basically the 21st-century Manhattan Project. They draw explicit parallels. They have modeled their own careers after those of some of the nuclear physicists during World War II.

Dario Amodei particularly.Totally. And some of them are interested in this for commercial reasons, or for reasons of power or influence, but others are just trying to prevent the world from blowing up. The thing that really grinds my gears is when I hear people implying that panic or worry about AI is new, as if these people had only now suddenly realized that this stuff could be dangerous, or maybe suggesting that they were trying to go public and ginned up these hypothetical fears as some kind of underhanded marketing campaign. That is complete garbage, complete nonsense. These people have been worried about AI since before there was really anything to worry about. Before the technology existed, they were playing out the future.

Some of their predictions were wrong or hyperbolic. But directionally, they have been correct about the important things, mainly that the technology would keep getting better. In one of Dario’s early speeches at Anthropic, he described concentric circles waking up to AI. And that first it would be the academic AI-research community, and then it would be the start-up community, and then it would be big tech. The circles get bigger, and ultimately you arrive at the last circle, which is the state. So unlike with the Manhattan Project, where the state was arguably the first institution to take the implications of nuclear physics seriously, here, the state has been one of the last major institutions to recognize that this stuff has military, economic, and political implications, that this is a strategically important technology. Individuals in the........

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