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Kevin Roose

@kevinroose.com

62K followers 150 following 100 posts

NYT tech columnist, Hard Fork co-host, best at 0.8x speed

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Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Jun 17

The NYT Magazine asked me and @caseynewton.bsky.social to open their AI issue by talking about how we use AI, why it's not going away, and how you can't be a serious critic if you're in denial about how useful it is. Bluesky's gonna love this one!

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/m...

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · May 22

lol

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · May 3

wow what a shill

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · May 3

It's Hard Fork Friday! This week on the show:

-- A hard look at Glazegate, and why it's bad when AI models are too nice
-- I got scanned by a Worldcoin orb
-- And @pjvogt.bsky.social joins us for a new segment about what's going on in our group chats

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lum...

How Nice Is Too Nice for an AI Chatbot? | EP 134

YouTube video by Hard Fork

www.youtube.com

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

he actually told me to publish it specifically at the worst possible time, he's always doing that

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

occasionally! but it's hard, so i do bad work instead

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

i think you missed the part of the article where i (the editor of the new york times, also the CEO of anthropic) called for only robots to have rights. read the room emily!!!

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

the story is actually about anthropic, a different company than openai. hope that helps.

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

no not really

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

he's been on!

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

hank, i fear you have mistaken this website for a place to talk about AI. this is a place to yell at AI until it goes away.

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

how dare you jerry. think of the people with no ability to fight unusually sized animals at all. do better.

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

I agree that you, personally, should resist the impulse to write about this stuff! 💪

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 25

My new column is drawing rave reviews like “go fuck yourself,” “die, loser” and more! Take a look and add yours to the pile!

The New York Times @nytimes.com · Apr 24

“Can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights?” our tech columnist asks. “Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close. But I was intrigued.”

Should We Start Taking the Welfare of A.I. Seriously?

As artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one A.I. company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious.

www.nytimes.com

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Apr 21

Some news: I'm writing a book about AGI!

This has been a while in the making, very excited to front-burner it for a while. I think what's happening in AI today is the most important and exciting story in the world, bar none, and I can't imagine a richer topic to write hundreds of pages about.

Why I'm Writing a Book About AGI

And how you can help

www.agichronicles.com

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Feb 21

It's Hard Fork Friday! This week on the show:

• Grok 3 is here, and it's...woke?
• An interview with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev about whether we're becoming a nation of gamblers
• And I build Casey a hot tub time machine using AI

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/p...

How ‘Based’ Is Grok 3? + Robinhood C.E.O. Vlad Tenev on Markets for Everything + Vibecoding 101

“Elon Musk is willing to spend a phenomenal amount of money and basically do everything he can to stay with the head of the pack on A.I. progress.”

www.nytimes.com

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Feb 19

omg Chris did we AI pill you???

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Feb 14

It's Hard Fork Friday! This week's show is a Valentine's Day spectacular!

• What happened at the big AI summit in Paris
• Is AI safety dead?
• How our producer Rachel uses AI to find love
• And Hinge CEO Justin McLeod on the AI-filled future of online dating

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/p...

A.I. Accelerates in Paris + Can A.I. Fix Your Love Life?

It’s a Valentine’s Day Special!

www.nytimes.com

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Feb 1

I spent a week testing Operator, OpenAI's new AI agent that can browse the web and take actions on your behalf. It ordered me dog food, booked a haircut, took online surveys for cash, and more.

Spooky stuff! Even spookier: it registered me for a LinkedIn webinar.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/t...

A Look at OpenAI’s Operator, a New A.I. Agent (Gift Article)

Operator, a new computer-using tool from OpenAI, is brittle and occasionally erratic, but it points to a future of powerful A.I. agents.

www.nytimes.com

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Jan 31

It's Hard Fork Friday! This week on the show:

• A DeepSeek DeepDive with the great @jordanschneider.bsky.social, who explains where DeepSeek sits in China's AI ecosystem
• We try OpenAI's new AI agent, Operator
• And choo choo, it's the Hot Mess Express!

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/p...

DeepSeek Deep Dive + Hands-On With Operator + Hot Mess Express!

“DeepSeek is a really odd duck.”

www.nytimes.com

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Jan 26

already did!

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Jan 24

It's Hard Fork Friday! This week on the show:

• TikTok is both dead and alive, Schrödinger's app
• How tech CEOs are trying to do business with Trump
• Memecoins are back, are you rich yet?
• And @chrislhayes.bsky.social joins to talk about his new book on attention

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/p...

Quantum TikTok + Memecoin Mania + Chris Hayes on the Attention Wars

“We are starting to see how Silicon Valley wants to do business during the Trump administration.”

www.nytimes.com

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Jan 23

I wrote about a new AI evaluation called "Humanity's Last Exam," a collection of 3,000 questions submitted by leading academics to try to stump leading AI models, which mostly find today's college-level tests too easy.

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/t...

A Test So Hard No AI System Can Pass It — Yet (Gift Article)

The creators of a new test called “Humanity’s Last Exam” argue we may soon lose the ability to create tests hard enough for A.I. models.

www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Kevin Roose

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Jan 22

on the tech industry's new "deal" nymag.com/intelligence...

Intelligencer
GIVE A GIFT
It is at least a little bit funny for one of the world's biggest beneficiaries of strategically written, time-sensitive venture-capital deals to tell the story of the last 30 years in tech in terms of an amorphous counterparty welching on an unwritten contract; it's the familiar "I didn't leave the party, the party left me" story, given new life in translation to the language of start-ups and funding. At least ask for a term sheet next time!
It's also the sort of pat, slightly contrarian story that dares you to ask obvious follow-up questions. Even if you accept and account for real ideological changes in the Democratic Party since the age of peak economic liberalism, is it possible that anything else happened in the tech industry between 1994 and 2016 that might have complicated its relationship with politicians and the general public? How about the economy in general? Were Republicans and conservatives vehemently criticizing and antagonizing and legislating against the tech industry at any point during this time, and if so, why didn't it matter? Did - and I'm just spitballing here — a "giant economic boom" actually come to pass, leading to the creation of some of the largest firms on earth, associated with some of the richest people on earth, whose exercise of power was felt by nearby institutions and everyday people in rather direct ways? Is it possible that the varied experiences and concerns of hundreds of millions of actual people with these companies
- not just the activist impulses of "communist" tech workers whose employers, according to Andreessen, "felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses" - might have had some downstream effects on this unspoken arrangement?

There are less obvious aspects of this new unspoken deal, however, that might also prove relevant. For example: While the new Trump administration is widely expected to reduce regulatory burdens and taxes on small and large tech companies, president has also, on previous occasions, threatened to throw some of his new allies in jail, to investigate and prosecute tech firms on ideological and personal grounds, and to wield threats of regulation in targeted and politicized ways. This new deal also seems to include an awful lot of ego-tending and loyalty-signaling under duress.
In this sense, it resembles the fondly remembered '90s, in which a dynamic, growing industry was largely left alone, less than it resembles the conservative tech horror story of the last four years, in which a vastly more powerful but still dynamic industry was very much not left alone, trapped between an unpredictable and intransigent government and whipsawing public opinion. Al Gore's tech-nerd mascots have been replaced with Trump's trillion-dollar mogul collection, placed on proud display during the inauguration, each facing genuine and novel political uncertainty about their respective companies and fortunes: Am I going to get that launch contract, or is Elon going to shut me out? Is "everything now legal" in crypto, post-Trump meme coin? Do we have an outside chance of buying into a semi-nationalized TikTok, or will we end up dealing with a competitor half-owned by the United States government? Are we going to be shut out of this Al infrastructure project? What does our chatbot say when you ask it about Donald Trump?

Kevin Roose @kevinroose.com · Jan 21

you should hire my friend Claude, he's pretty smart