Dwarkesh Podcast
Episodes 142 total
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 de…
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…
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…
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…
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: destro…
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…
@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…
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 th…
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 gr…
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…
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 broke…
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 lea…
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 througho…
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…
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…
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 explosio…
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 ou…
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 LL…
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…
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?, especia…