Dwarkesh Podcast
Episodes 142 total
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 scient…
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…
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 econ…
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…
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 th…
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…
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…
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…
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 i…
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…
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 YouTub…
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.Mic…
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 centu…
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…
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 ven…
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 thought…
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.Afte…
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” fo…
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. S…
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…