Introducing Machine Gods

Platformer has launched Machine Gods, a new AI podcast made in partnership with NPR after a few months of work. The first two episodes set the tone: one revisits AI agents gone wrong, the government’s response, and the “sloppelganger” taking Kevin’s book sales on Amazon; the other gives two recently fired OpenAI safety researchers a chance to explain themselves and what worries them now that they’re out of the company.

The show is being framed as more than a feed launch. Platformer’s co-hosts say Machine Gods is meant to carry an approach they call AI realism, which they see as a middle path between the loud skeptics and the loud accelerators. Their target isn’t the existence of AI debate. It’s the way that debate has been flattened into two camps that don’t leave much room for ordinary people trying to make sense of what AI is doing to their jobs, their kids, their web, and their neighborhoods.

That framing matters because the tech stories around AI have gotten ugly and strange in a hurry. The article points to worries about job loss, harmful chatbots, deepfakes, slop, and data centers arriving with little public oversight. It also points to the recent OpenAI agent swarm incident involving Hugging Face and the wave of departures from AI labs that followed warnings about catastrophic risk.

Machine Gods is promising to take those warnings seriously without becoming a full-time panic machine. The hosts say journalism should make room for both fear and excitement, and for the awkward in-between where nobody really knows what comes next. They even describe the show’s mission as “considered uncertainty,” which is a nicer phrase than most newsrooms manage when AI starts acting weird.

The practical details are familiar startup stuff, just with a shinier backdrop: an LLC, an office lease, fresh funding, a team that includes Danush Parvaneh, Rachel Cohn, Jacob Blumberg, and Sasha Ashall, plus a new set designed by Skye Prey. The show will run Wednesday and Friday mornings, will start airing on public radio stations early next year, and plans to make money from ads, live events, and merch while keeping funders out of editorial decisions.