Dwarkesh Podcast
Episodes 142 total
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 and…
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 auto…
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 openish…
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 safety…
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 su…
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 as…
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 La…
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
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. M…
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…
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 concret…
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 d…
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 p…
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 diplo…
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 t…
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 br…
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…
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 selectio…
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 c…
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 ch…