Kevin Roose
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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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kevinroose.com
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...
June 17, 2025 at 2:35 PM
kevinroose.com
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
May 3, 2025 at 12:13 AM
kevinroose.com
My new column is drawing rave reviews like “go fuck yourself,” “die, loser” and more! Take a look and add yours to the pile!
nytimes.com 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
April 25, 2025 at 2:25 AM
kevinroose.com
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
April 21, 2025 at 9:37 PM
kevinroose.com
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
February 21, 2025 at 6:21 PM
kevinroose.com
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
February 14, 2025 at 6:56 PM
kevinroose.com
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
February 1, 2025 at 9:41 PM
kevinroose.com
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
January 31, 2025 at 4:56 PM
kevinroose.com
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
January 24, 2025 at 6:28 PM
kevinroose.com
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
January 23, 2025 at 4:41 PM
Reposted by Kevin Roose
jwherrman.bsky.social
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?
January 22, 2025 at 5:41 PM
kevinroose.com
It's Hard Fork Friday! This week:

• TikTok ban v12 final final USE THIS ONE
• HuggingFace's @sashamtl.bsky.social joins to talk about the environmental impact of AI
• And finally, put on your gold chains and pop some Zyns, it's time for MASCULINE ENERGY

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/p...
Goodbye TikTok, Ni Hao RedNote? + A.I.’s Environmental Impact + Meta’s Masculine Energy
“This is truly one of the funniest and most unexpected stories of the young year so far.”
www.nytimes.com
January 17, 2025 at 5:34 PM
kevinroose.com
Coming tomorrow: the most masculine Hard Fork episode ever
January 16, 2025 at 9:32 PM
Reposted by Kevin Roose
caseynewton.bsky.social
It really is such masculine energy to blame things on a woman who no longer works at the company www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/u...
Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products. Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for Facebook’s culture, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.
January 16, 2025 at 8:08 PM
kevinroose.com
Normal company!
January 14, 2025 at 12:48 AM
Reposted by Kevin Roose
maxread.info
on zuck's gold chain open.substack.com/pub/maxread/...
It’s been clear for a while now that Zuckerberg has been Up To Something. Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have described it as the “Zuckaissance”: Over the past eighteen months or so he grew out his hair; he replaced his hoodies with boxy tees; he got really into M.M.A. and wakeboarding. And, yes, he started wearing a gold chain. New Zuck is undeniably less off-putting than old, sweaty-hoodie, Caesar-cut Zuck. But he’s also unmistakably fratty, butch, and (to borrow an overused Twitter phrase) “right-coded,” partaking in the aesthetic and the hobbies of people you would expect to own crypto, listen to mindset podcasts, and vote for Trump (or, at least, refuse to vote for Biden). It’s not exactly groundbreaking that a rich 40-year-old man has started wearing expensive streetwear. But usually this kind of personal journey culminates in divorce or hilarious/gruesome police body-cam footage or an announcement that you’re moving to Africa for a year, not in a video about new content-moderation guidelines. Zuck seems to have slowly transformed himself into a Dana White hanger-on who dresses like a Kick streamer in order to make to make this post-election right-wing turn seem authentic and deeply felt, rather than merely convenient. I wouldn’t object if you wanted to conspiracize this--a man with access to incredibly granular, up-to-the-minute data on shifting socio-cultural and political trends makes himself a human Trending Topics module in his mode of dress and choice of hobbies, a reflection of the activity and sentiment rippling across his vast empire--but I also wouldn’t object if you wanted to insist to me that this new makeover reflects an authentic political evolution. Certainly, Zuckerberg would like everyone to think it does; Kevin Roose reports that “several friends and associates of Mr. Zuckerberg’s” have told him that the aesthetic overhaul is accompanied by a genuine change in beliefs: “the billionaire’s personal politics have shifted sharply to the right since 2020, and that his embrace of Mr. Trump may stem less from cynical opportunism than real enthusiasm.” But the interesting thing to me is less the question of authenticity around Zuck’s evolution and more the public-facing strategy. It would be easy enough, after all, to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago a few times, send a few letters to House Judiciary, and call it a day. Why is Zuck so invested in, effectively, “vice-signaling”? Why is it so important to him to build cultural credibility as a--well, if not a conservative, precisely, then as an “anti-establishment”-coded “classical liberal”? Why is he dressed like that?
January 10, 2025 at 9:39 PM
kevinroose.com
Inspiring words on innovation from the inventor of Stories, Reels, and Threads.
January 11, 2025 at 12:26 AM
kevinroose.com
It’s Hard Fork Friday! This week on the show:

• The gadget robbers did NOT take from my house
• What’s really behind Meta’s MAGA pivot
• Deepseek, o3, and catching up on a wild month of AI progress
• And 2025’s first game of HatGPT!

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/p...
Meta Goes MAGA Mode + a Big Month in A.I. + HatGPT
“I think this set of changes that the company announced this week are the most important series of policy changes that they have made in the past five years.”
www.nytimes.com
January 10, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by Kevin Roose
sambiddle.com
NEW: I've obtained internal Meta docs revealing an array of sample posts that are now allowed under new hate speech rules. Examples include calling children "trannies," “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians," and “immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit”

theintercept.com/2025/01/09/f...
Leaked Meta Rules: Users Are Free to Post “Mexican Immigrants Are Trash!” or “Trans People Are Immoral”
Facebook now allows attacks on immigrants and trans people, and posts like “Mexican immigrants are trash!” and “I’m a proud racist.”
theintercept.com
January 10, 2025 at 12:48 AM
kevinroose.com
Everyone assumes Zuckerberg is a cynical operator who is cozying up to Trump for business reasons, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility that spending so much time around MMA guys/in the Rogansphere has truly pilled him.
kurtwagner.bsky.social Kurt Wagner @kurtwagner.bsky.social · Jan 6
New: Mark Zuckerberg is appointing three new directors to Meta’s board, including UFC’s Dana White.

White and Zuckerberg have become friends given Zuckerberg‘s interest in MMA. White was also a very vocal and involved Trump supporter during the campaign.
January 6, 2025 at 9:35 PM
kevinroose.com
5 minutes after giving my toddler kinetic sand: this stuff is incredible, a marvel of material science

day 3 of finding lumps of sand in every furniture crevice in the house: whoever invented this should be tried at The Hague
January 4, 2025 at 1:57 AM
kevinroose.com
Every year, I compile a list of my favorite tech projects, and honor them in a column called the Good Tech Awards.

This year, I was excited to feature LLMs for genomics, AI brain mapping, open-source maintainers, the NASA heroes who saved Voyager 1, and more.

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/t...
The 2024 Good Tech Awards (Gift Article)
In a year of continued A.I. progress, “founder mode” drama and a Trump election win, a few tech projects stood out for their clear benefits to humanity.
www.nytimes.com
December 31, 2024 at 4:49 PM
kevinroose.com
the feeling when the scissors glide through the wrapping paper >>>>>>>>
December 25, 2024 at 4:53 AM
Reposted by Kevin Roose
caseynewton.bsky.social
"All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated for o3," says the founder of the ARC prize — designed to be very difficult for LLMs to solve — after OpenAI took the benchmark from 5% with o1 to 85% today with o3 arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-...
This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models. For context, ARC-AGI-1 took 4 years to go from 0% with GPT-3 in 2020 to 5% in 2024 with GPT-4o. All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated for o3.
December 20, 2024 at 6:45 PM
kevinroose.com
It’s Hard Fork Friday! This week, @caseynewton.bsky.social and I went to Arizona to see Amazon’s overhauled drone delivery program, which brought us a jar of Brazilian Bum Bum Cream in 45 minutes.

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/p...
Is Amazon’s Drone Delivery Finally Ready for Prime Time?
We flew to Arizona to test the recently debuted service ourselves.
www.nytimes.com
December 20, 2024 at 5:13 PM