Dwarkesh Podcast
Deeply researched interviews with experts on a variety of topics, hosted by Dwarkesh Patel. The podcast explores ideas in technology, science, philosophy, and more. Each episode features in-depth conversations that aim to uncover insights and understanding.
Episodes
Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research?
Ryan Greenblatt is the Chief Scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety research. He's also lead author on the "Alignment faking in Large Language Models", and is currently working on a third party investigation into the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident. In my opinion, he's one of the most interesting thinkers on the future of AI.Had him on to discuss/debate recursive self-imp
8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning
Read the essay here. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x
This is a video recording of a post I wrote last week. If you want to read the original you can check it out here.Thanks to Mercury for sponsoring this video. Mercury’s built-in AI, Command, helps me close my books and saves me a bunch of time. At the end of each month, Command categorizes my transactions and provides its rationale for every choice: I just review, fix anything that’s off, and appr
Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity
Adam Brown is back!General relativity is said to be the most beautiful idea the human mind has ever produced. Most of us will never get to fully appreciate its elegance by taking the 20-lecture graduate course Adam taught on it at Stanford. But in this episode, Adam distills the key idea at its heart so clearly and compellingly that even I could keep up lol.At the core of general relativity, Einst
Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math
Always so much fun to chat with Grant.AI has been making much faster progress in math than in other fields. As a result, mathematics is showing us, very concretely, what AI progress in other fields will look like. Even within mathematics, there’s a jagged landscape. What does it look like?What is the nature of the most important conceptual breakthroughs in the history of mathematics, and how diffe
The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job
Read it here.Thanks to Mercury for sponsoring this essay.Mercury has automated basically my entire bill pay process for my business. I just give contractors a dedicated email address, and when they send an invoice, Mercury automatically creates a draft payment for me to review. I no longer have to hunt through my inbox for invoices or deal with messy spreadsheets to track my bills. Mercury handles
The data black hole at the center of AI
Read the transcript here.Thanks to Mercury for sponsoring this essay!Mercury just released a new feature called Command, which gives me AI right in my banking platform. And since I use Mercury to run basically my entire business, Command has access to all the info it needs to get real work done. I can ask it to send invoices, or categorize expenses, or even transfer money… and Command just handles
Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
Had Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time.Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence.In 1513 the Medici retook control of Floren
Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
Economics of AGI episode w Alex Imas and Phil Trammell.There’s a bunch of important questions about how we deal with AI that only economics can answer.What is the optimal way to tax and redistribute the wealth that will be generated? How should countries not in the AI supply chain index into the gains? Is there any world where inequality doesn’t explode?It might seem like these questions have obvi
Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up
New blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.Reiner is CEO of MatX, a new chip startup (full disclosure - I’m an angel investor). He was previously at Google, where he worked on software efficiency, compilers, and TPU architecture.Watch this one on YouTub
Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
Eric Jang walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools.Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward. AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play. You have to go back to 2017 to get insight into how the more general AIs of the future might learn.Once he explained how A
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
David Reich is back.He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution.By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up.Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronz
Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served
Did a very different format with Reiner Pope - a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served.It’s shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations, public API prices, and some chalk.It’s a bit technical, but I encourage you to hang in there – it’s really worth it.There are less than a handful of people who understand
Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat
I asked Jensen about TPU competition, Nvidia’s lock on the ever more bottlenecked supply chain needed to make advanced chips, whether we should be selling AI chips to China, why Nvidia doesn’t just become a hyperscaler, how it makes its investments, and much more. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Crusoe’s cloud runs on state-of-the-art Blackwell GPUs, with Vera Rubin deploymen
Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses
Really enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress.It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop for scientific discovery.But it's also a surprisingly mysterious and elusive question when you look at the history of human science.We approach this question stories like Einstein (who claimed that he hadn't even heard of the famous Michelson-Morley
Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion.People sometimes say that AI will make especially fast progress at scientific discovery because of tight verification loops.But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia)
Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute
Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, provides a deep dive into the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute: logic, memory, and power.And walks through the economics of labs, hyperscalers, foundries, and fab equipment manufacturers.Learned a ton about every single level of the stack. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Mercury has already saved me a bunch of time this tax season.
The most important question nobody's asking about AI
Read the full essay here: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropicTimestamps(00:00:00) - Anthropic vs The Pentagon(00:04:16) - The overhangs of tyranny(00:05:54) - AI structurally favors mass surveillance(00:08:25) - Alignment...to whom?(00:13:55) - Coordination not worth the costs Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago).Some especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the Renaissance:Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so did t
Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
Dario Amodei thinks we are just a few years away from AGI — or as he puts it, from having “a country of geniuses in a data center”. In this episode, we discuss what to make of the scaling hypothesis in the current RL regime, why task-specific RL might lead to generalization, and how AI will diffuse throughout the economy. We also dive into Anthropic’s revenue projections, compute commitments, path
Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Mercury just started offering personal banking! I’m already banki
Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain
Adam Marblestone is CEO of Convergent Research. He’s had a very interesting past life: he was a research scientist at Google Deepmind on their neuroscience team and has worked on everything from brain-computer interfaces to quantum computing to nanotech and even formal mathematics.In this episode, we discuss how the brain learns so much from so little, what the AI field can learn from neuroscience
Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)
Read the essay here.Timestamps00:00:00 What are we scaling?00:03:11 The value of human labor00:05:04 Economic diffusion lag is cope00:06:34 Goal-post shifting is justified00:08:23 RL scaling00:09:18 Broadly deployed intelligence explosion Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War
This is the final episode of the Sarah Paine lecture series, and it’s probably my favorite one. Sarah gives a “tour of the arguments” on what ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse, diving into the role of the US, the Sino-Soviet border conflict, the oil bust, ethnic rebellions and even the Roman Catholic Church. As she points out, this is all particularly interesting as we find ourselves p
Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Gemini 3 is the first model I’ve used that can find connections I haven’t anticipated. I recently wrote a blog post on RL’s information efficiency, and Gemini 3 helped me think it all through. It also genera
Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI
As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and me an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter.Microsoft is building multiple Fairwaters, each of which has hundreds of thousands of GB200s & GB300s. Between all these interconnected buildings, they’ll have over 2 GW of total capacity. Just to give a frame of reference, even a single one o
Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise
In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for over a century.This lecture was particularly interesting to me because, in my opinion, the Chinese Civil War is 1 of the top 3 most important events of the 20th century. And to understand why it transpired as it did, you need to understand Stalin’s rol
Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
The Andrej Karpathy episode.During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will just blend into the previous ~2.5 centuries of 2% GDP growth, why self driving took so long to crack, and what he sees as the future of education.It was a pleasure chatting with him.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Labelbox helps
Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable
Nick Lane has some pretty wild ideas about the evolution of life.He thinks early life was continuous with the spontaneous chemistry of undersea hydrothermal vents.Nick’s story may be wrong, but I find it remarkable that with just that starting point, you can explain so much about why life is the way that it is — the things you’re supposed to just take as givens in biology class:* Why are there two
Some thoughts on the Sutton interview
I have a much better understanding of Sutton’s perspective now. I wanted to reflect on it a bit.(00:00:00) - The steelman(00:02:42) - TLDR of my current thoughts(00:03:22) - Imitation learning is continuous with and complementary to RL(00:08:26) - Continual learning(00:10:31) - Concluding thoughts Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end.After interviewing him, my steel man of Richard’s position is this: LLMs aren’t capable of learning on-the-job, so no matter how much we scale, we’ll need some new architecture to enable continual learning.And once we have it, we won’t need a s
Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine
Sergey Levine, one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose robots. His median estimate for when robots will be able to run households entirely autonomously? 2030.If Sergey’s right, the world 5 years from now will be an insanely different place than it is today. This conversation f
How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine
In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. She then applies this framework to today, arguing that Russia and China are similarly constrained by their geography, making them vulnerable in any conflict with maritime powers (like the U.S. and its allies).Watch on YouTube; listen on Appl
Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel
Jacob Kimmel thinks he can find the transcription factors to reverse aging. We do a deep dive on why this might be plausible and why evolution hasn’t optimized for longevity. We also talk about why drug discovery has been getting exponentially harder, and what a new platform for biological understanding to speed up progress would look like. As a bonus, we get into the nitty gritty of gene delivery
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer
How will we feed the 100s of GWs of extra energy demand that AI will create over the coming decade? On this episode, Casey Handmer (Caltech PhD, former NASA JPL, founder & CEO of Terraform Industries) walks me through how we can pull it off, and why he thinks a major part of this energy singularity will be powered by solar. His views are contrarian, but he came armed to defend them.Watch on YouTub
Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard
A deep dive with Lewis Bollard, who leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farmed Animal Welfare, on the surprising economics of the meat industry.Why is factory farming so efficient? How can we make the lives of the 23+ billion animals living on factory farms more bearable? How far off are the moonshots (e.g., brainless chickens, cultivated meats, etc.) to end this mass suffering? And why does th
Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China
After my last lecture series with Sarah Paine ended, I still had so many questions. I knew we’d only scratched the surface of Sarah’s scholarship, so I immediately invited her back for another series: she graciously agreed, and we’ll be releasing the results online over the coming weeks and months!This first lecture is focused on the balance of power in East Asia at the turn of the 20th century. S
Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history
The Stephen Kotkin episode. Kotkin is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Joseph Stalin and has written a massive 2-volume biography on him (with a 3rd volume in the works).No other individual had more of a profound impact on the 20th century than Stalin. He held the power of life and death over every single person across 11 time zones, and he killed tens of millions of people, utterly consume
Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner
I’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away - others 2 years. Here’s an audio version of where my thoughts stand as of June 2025. If you want to read the original post, you can check it out here. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church
George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades.Professor Church thinks that these improvements (e.g., orders of magnitude decrease in sequencing & synthesis costs, precise gene editing tools like CRISPR, AlphaFold-type AIs, & the ability to conduct massively parallel multiplex experiments) hav
Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber
Arthur Kroeber is a leading researcher on Chinese tech and macro, a founding partner at Gavekal Dragonomics, and author of "China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know." It's the most useful, detailed resource I've found of how China actually works.On this episode, we discuss how China achieved high-tech manufacturing dominance, and where they'll go from here. By Arthur’s account, the Chinese gov
"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff
Ken Rogoff is the former chief economist of the IMF, a professor of Economics at Harvard, and author of the newly released Our Dollar, Your Problem and This Time is Different.On this episode, Ken predicts that, within the next decade, the US will have a debt-induced inflation crisis, but not a Japan-type financial crisis (the latter is much worse, and can make a country poorer for generations).Ken
Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih
On this episode, I chat with Victor Shih about all things China. We discuss China’s massive local debt crisis, the CCP’s views on AI, what happens after Xi, and more.Victor Shih is an expert on the Chinese political system, as well as their banking and fiscal policies, and he has amassed more biographical data on the Chinese elite than anyone else in the world. He teaches at UC San Diego, where he
Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken
New episode with my good friends Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken. Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton researches mechanistic interpretability, both at Anthropic.We talk through what’s changed in the last year of AI research; the new RL regime and how far it can scale; how to trace a model’s thoughts; and how countries, workers, and students should prepare for AGI.See you next year for v3. He
What will automated firms look like?
Based on my essay about AI firms.Huge thanks to Petr and his team for bringing this to life!Watch on YouTube.Thanks to Google for sponsoring. We used their Veo 2 model to make this entire video—it generated everything from the photorealistic humans to the claymation octopuses. If you’re a Gemini Advanced user, you can try Veo 2 now in the Gemini app. Just select Veo 2 in the dropdown, and type you
Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 months
Zuck on:* Llama 4, benchmark gaming* Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI* DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump* Orion glasses, AI relationships, and preventing reward-hacking from our tech.Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.----------SPONSORS* Scale is building the infrastructure for safer, smarter AI. Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-qual
Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper
800 years before the Black Death, the very same bacteria ravaged Rome, killing 60%+ of the population in many areas.Also, back-to-back volcanic eruptions caused a mini Ice Age, leaving Rome devastated by famine and disease.I chatted with historian Kyle Harper about this and much else:* Rome as a massive slave society* Why humans are more disease-prone than other animals* How agriculture made us ph
AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu
Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an intelligence explosion is plausible, but are convinced we'll see explosive economic growth (economy literally doubling every year or two).This discussion offers a totally different scenario than my recent interview with Scott and Daniel.Ege and Tamay are the co-founders of Mechanize (di
AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
Scott and Daniel break down every month from now until the 2027 intelligence explosion.Scott Alexander is author of the highly influential blogs Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. Daniel Kokotajlo resigned from OpenAI in 2024, rejecting a non-disparagement clause and risking millions in equity to speak out about AI safety.We discuss misaligned hive minds, Xi and Trump waking up, and automated
AMA: career advice given AGI, how I research ft. Sholto & Trenton
I recorded an AMA! I had a blast chatting with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. We discussed my new book, career advice given AGI, how I pick guests, how I research for the show, and some other nonsense.My book, “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025” is available in digital format now. Preorders for the print version are also open!Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcas
Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution
Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence.Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years.I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious.How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error?Has the human brain declined in size over the last 10,0
Notes on China
I’m so excited with how this visualization of Notes on China turned out. Petr, thank you for such beautiful watercolor artwork. More to come!Watch on YouTube.----------Timestamps(0:00:00) - Intro(0:00:32) - Scale(0:05:50) - Vibes(0:11:14) - Youngsters(0:14:27) - Tech & AI(0:15:47) - Hearts & Minds(0:17:07) - On Travel Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Satya Nadella — Microsoft’s AGI plan & quantum breakthrough
Satya Nadella on: Why he doesn’t believe in AGI but does believe in 10% economic growth; Microsoft’s new topological qubit breakthrough and gaming world models;Whether Office commoditizes LLMs or the other way around. Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.----------SponsorsScale partners with major AI labs like Meta, Google Deepmind, and OpenAI. Through Scale’s Data Foundry, labs g
Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer — 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI
This week I welcome on the show two of the most important technologists ever, in any field.Jeff Dean is Google's Chief Scientist, and through 25 years at the company, has worked on basically the most transformative systems in modern computing: from MapReduce, BigTable, Tensorflow, AlphaChip, to Gemini.Noam Shazeer invented or co-invented all the main architectures and techniques that are used for
Sarah Paine — How Mao conquered China (lecture & interview)
Third and final episode in the Paine trilogy!Chinese history is full of warlords constantly challenging the capital. How could Mao not only stay in power for decades, but not even face any insurgency?And how did Mao go from military genius to peacetime disaster - the patriotic hero who inflicted history’s worst human catastrophe on China? How can someone shrewd enough to win a civil war outnumbere
Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)
This is the second episode in the trilogy of a lectures by Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College.In this second episode, Prof Paine dissects the ideas and economics behind Japanese imperialism before and during WWII. We get into the oil shortage which caused the war; the unique culture of honor and death; the surprisingly chaotic chain of command. This is followed by a Q&A with me.Huge th
Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview)
I’m thrilled to launch a new trilogy of double episodes: a lecture series by Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College, each followed by a deep Q&A.In this first episode, Prof Paine talks about key decisions by Khrushchev, Mao, Nehru, Bhutto, & Lyndon Johnson that shaped the whole dynamic of South Asia today. This is followed by a Q&A.Come for the spy bases, shoestring nukes, and insight abou
Tyler Cowen — The #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans
I interviewed Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference 2024. As always, I had a blast. This is my fourth interview with him – and yet I’m always hearing new stuff.We talked about why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth, the real bottlenecks on world progress, him now writing for AIs instead of humans, and the difficult relationship between being cultured and fostering growth – among m
Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT
Adam Brown is a founder and lead of BlueShift with is cracking maths and reasoning at Google DeepMind and a theoretical physicist at Stanford.We discuss: destroying the light cone with vacuum decay, holographic principle, mining black holes, & what it would take to train LLMs that can make Einstein level conceptual breakthroughs.Stupefying, entertaining, & terrifying.Enjoy!Watch on YouTube, read t
Gwern — Anonymous writer who predicted AI trajectory on $12K/year salary
Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive.In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed.After the episode, I co
@Asianometry & Dylan Patel — How the semiconductor industry actually works
A bonanza on the semiconductor industry and hardware scaling to AGI by the end of the decade.Dylan Patel runs Semianalysis, the leading publication and research firm on AI hardware. Jon Y runs Asianometry, the world’s best YouTube channel on semiconductors and business history.* What Xi would do if he became scaling pilled* $ 1T+ in datacenter buildout by end of decadeWatch on YouTube. Listen on A
Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin
Unless you understand the history of oil, you cannot understand the rise of America, WW1, WW2, secular stagnation, the Middle East, Ukraine, how Xi and Putin think, and basically anything else that's happened since 1860.It was a great honor to interview Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Prize - the best history of oil ever written (which makes it the best history of the 20th
David Reich — How one small tribe conquered the world 70,000 years ago
I had no idea how wild human history was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich.Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring ‘something’ out, and then basically wiping everyone else out.From the tribe of 1k-10k modern humans who killed off all the other human species 70,000 years ago; to the Yamnaya horse nomads 5,000 years ago who killed off 90+% of
Joe Carlsmith — Preventing an AI takeover
Chatted with Joe Carlsmith about whether we can trust power/techno-capital, how to not end up like Stalin in our urge to control the future, gentleness towards the artificial Other, and much more.Check out Joe's sequence on Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI here.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twi
Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan
I talked with Patrick McKenzie (known online as patio11) about how a small team he ran over a Discord server got vaccines into Americans' arms: A story of broken incentives, outrageous incompetence, and how a few individuals with high agency saved 1000s of lives.Enjoy!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twit
Tony Blair — Why political leaders keep failing at major change
I chatted with Tony Blair about:- What he learned from Lee Kuan Yew- Intelligence agencies track record on Iraq & Ukraine- What he tells the dozens of world leaders who come seek advice from him- How much of a PM’s time is actually spent governing- What will AI’s July 1914 moment look like from inside the Cabinet?Enjoy!Watch the video on YouTube. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter
Francois Chollet — Why the biggest AI models can't solve simple puzzles
Here is my conversation with Francois Chollet and Mike Knoop on the $1 million ARC-AGI Prize they're launching today.I did a bunch of socratic grilling throughout, but Francois’s arguments about why LLMs won’t lead to AGI are very interesting and worth thinking through.It was really fun discussing/debating the cruxes. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast
Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history
Chatted with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner on the trillion dollar nationalized cluster, CCP espionage at AI labs, how unhobblings and scaling can lead to 2027 AGI, dangers of outsourcing clusters to Middle East, leaving OpenAI, and situational awareness.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updat
John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) — Reasoning, RLHF, & plan for 2027 AGI
Chatted with John Schulman (cofounded OpenAI and led ChatGPT creation) on how posttraining tames the shoggoth, and the nature of the progress to come...Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Pre-training, post-training, and future capabilities(00:16
Mark Zuckerberg — Llama 3, $10B models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW datacenters
Mark Zuckerberg on:- Llama 3- open sourcing towards AGI- custom silicon, synthetic data, & energy constraints on scaling- Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much moreEnjoy!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Human edited transcript with helpful links here.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Llama 3(00:08:32) - Coding on path to AG
Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken — How LLMs actually think
Had so much fun chatting with my good friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas on the podcast.No way to summarize it, except: This is the best context dump out there on how LLMs are trained, what capabilities they're likely to soon have, and what exactly is going on inside them.You would be shocked how much of what I know about this field, I've learned just from talking with them.To the extent t
Demis Hassabis — Scaling, superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, AlphaFold
Here is my episode with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMindWe discuss:* Why scaling is an artform* Adding search, planning, & AlphaZero type training atop LLMs* Making sure rogue nations can't steal weights* The right way to align superhuman AIs and do an intelligence explosionWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Time
Patrick Collison — Why Silicon Valley's most talented should leave
We discuss:* what it takes to process $1 trillion/year* how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships* what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is quite an open ended prompt, and the Collison brothers are just getting started).Plus the amazing stuff they're doing at Arc Institute, the financial infrastructure for AI agents, playing devil's advocate against progress
Tyler Cowen — Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, animal spirits, anarchy, & growth
It was a great pleasure speaking with Tyler Cowen for the 3rd time.We discussed GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?, especially in the context of how the insights of Hayek, Keynes, Smith, and other great economists help us make sense of AI, growth, animal spirits, prediction markets, alignment, central planning, and much more.The topics covered in this episode a
![Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro [Narration]](https://apple.dwarkesh-podcast.workers.dev/art/v1/c3Vic3RhY2s6cG9zdDoxNDA4NDA3MTE.jpg)
Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro [Narration]
This is a narration of my blog post, Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/lyndon-johnsonListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future posts and episodes. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
![Will scaling work? [Narration]](https://apple.dwarkesh-podcast.workers.dev/art/v1/c3Vic3RhY2s6cG9zdDoxNDA4NDAyNjY.jpg)
Will scaling work? [Narration]
This is a narration of my blog post, Will scaling work?. You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-workListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future posts and episodes. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Jung Chang (Wild Swans author) — Living through history's largest man-made famine
A true honor to speak with Jung Chang.She is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (sold 15+ million copies worldwide) and Mao: The Unknown Story.We discuss:- what it was like growing up during the Cultural Revolution as the daughter of a denounced official- why the CCP continues to worship the biggest mass murderer in human history.- how exactly Communist totalitarianism was able to
Andrew Roberts — Why Hitler lost WWII, Churchill as applied historian, & Napoleon as startup founder
Andrew Roberts is the world's best biographer and one of the leading historians of our time.We discussed* Churchill the applied historian,* Napoleon the startup founder,* why Nazi ideology cost Hitler WW2,* drones, reconnaissance, and other aspects of the future of war,* Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Ukraine, & Taiwan.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.
Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance
Here is my interview with Dominic Cummings on why Western governments are so dangerously broken, and how to fix them before an even more catastrophic crisis.Dominic was Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister during COVID, and before that, director of Vote Leave (which masterminded the 2016 Brexit referendum).Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the
Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover
Paul Christiano is the world’s leading AI safety researcher. My full episode with him is out!We discuss:- Does he regret inventing RLHF, and is alignment necessarily dual-use?- Why he has relatively modest timelines (40% by 2040, 15% by 2030),- What do we want post-AGI world to look like (do we want to keep gods enslaved forever)?- Why he’s leading the push to get to labs develop responsible scali
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