Dwarkesh Podcast
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Dwarkesh Podcast
Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com
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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...
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) - TL...
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 dea...
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 fl...
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 duri...
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...
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, forme...
The surprising economics of the meat industry – 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.
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...
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...
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...
George Church — A Billion Years of Evolution in a Single Afternoon
George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decad...
China’s Manufacturing Dominance: State Directives & Ruthless Competition — 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 Ever...
“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 an...
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 aft...
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, b...
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...
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
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...
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,...
2027 Intelligence Explosion: Month-by-Month Model — 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 blog...
AMA ft. Sholto & Trenton: New Book, Career Advice Given AGI, How I'd Start From Scratch
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...
Joseph Henrich – Why Humans Survived and Smarter Species Didn't
Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence.
Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrive...
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!
Wa...
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...
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 2...
Sarah Paine Episode 3: How Mao Conquered China
Third and final episode in the Paine trilogy!
Chinese history is full of warlords constantly challenging the capital. How could Mao not only sta...
Sarah Paine Episode 2: Why Japan Lost (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 di...
Sarah Paine Episode 1: 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...
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...
Adam Brown – How Future Civilizations Could Change The Laws of Physics
Adam Brown is a founder and lead of BlueShift with is cracking maths and reasoning at Google DeepMind and a theoretical physicist at Stanford.
W...
Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory
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...
Dylan Patel & Jon (Asianometry) – 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 publica...
Daniel Yergin – Oil Explains the Entire 20th Century
Unless you understand the history of oil, you cannot understand the rise of America, WW1, WW2, secular stagnation, the Middle East, Ukraine, how Xi an...
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...
Joe Carlsmith - Otherness and control in the age of AGI
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, gentlenes...
Patrick McKenzie - How a Discord Server Saved Thousands of Lives
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 stor...
Tony Blair - Life of a PM, The Deep State, Lee Kuan Yew, & AI's 1914 Moment
I chatted with Tony Blair about:
- What he learned from Lee Kuan Yew
- Intelligence agencies track record on Iraq & Ukraine
- What h...
Francois Chollet, Mike Knoop - LLMs won’t lead to AGI - $1,000,000 Prize to find true solution
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...
Leopold Aschenbrenner - China/US Super Intelligence Race, 2027 AGI, & 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 le...