Shows / Dwarkesh Podcast
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Dwarkesh PodcastWhat I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses
I recently got to interview Robert Caro, who is my favorite author of all time. This gave me the excuse to reread his biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert…
Dwarkesh PodcastWhat will computer chips look like in 2045?
Demand for AI compute has grown 3x a year for the last decade, but according to Intel’s CTO, there are only enough chipmaking tools in the world to roughly…
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Welcome to the World of Art
Welcome to Beyond the Canvas! In this first episode, “Welcome to the World of Art,” we’re taking a relaxed journey into the amazing world of creativity and…
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Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?
New episode with military historian Si Sheppard.The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history.Hernan Cortés…
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Noam Brown – Agent swarms, alignment, & recursive self-improvement
New episode with Noam Brown.We talk about multi-agent, Navier-Stokes, and what the current explosion of maths progress tells us about what happens once you…
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AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement
New episode with John Schulman, Beren Millidge and Charlie O’Neill. I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the…
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Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face
Ajeya Cotra is a researcher at METR, where she works on threat modeling for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI. Before that, she led the technical AI…
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The rise and fall of agent civilizations
This is a video recording of a post I wrote last week. You can read the original here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other…
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Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028
Had a lot of fun chatting again with my twin brother Dylan Patel.We went through lab economics over the next few years - the shift from inference to training…
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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…
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8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning
Read the essay here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com
- Dwarkesh Podcast
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…
- Dwarkesh Podcast
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
- Dwarkesh Podcast
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 hydrothermal…
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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…
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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…
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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”…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
- Dwarkesh Podcast
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…
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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…
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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…
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"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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…