Dwarkesh Podcast

Zuck on:

* Llama 4, benchmark gaming

* Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI

* DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump

* Orion glasses, AI relationships, and preventing reward-hacking from our

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 caused a mini Ice Age, leaving Rome

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 convinced we'll see explosive economic

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 Codex and Astral Codex Ten. Daniel

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 guests, how I research for the show, and

Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence.

Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years.

I’ve always found this cultural

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!

Watch on YouTube.

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Timestamps

(0:00:00) -

Satya Nadella on:

Why he doesn’t believe in AGI but does believe in 10% economic growth;

Microsoft’s new topological qubit breakthrough and gaming world models;

Whether Office commoditizes LLMs or the

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 25 years at the company, has worked on basically the most

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 decades, but not even face any

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 and economics behind Japanese

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 first episode, Prof Paine talks

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.

We talked about why he thinks AI won't

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: destroying the light cone with vacuum decay,

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 interesting polymathic thinkers

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 firm on AI hardware. Jon Y runs

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 think, and basically anything else that's

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 group figuring ‘something’ out, and then

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 the artificial Other, and much

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 broken incentives, outrageous incompetence,

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 leaders who come seek advice from him

- How

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 throughout, but Francois’s arguments about why

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 AGI, dangers of outsourcing clusters

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 YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, 

Mark Zuckerberg on:

- Llama 3

- open sourcing towards AGI

- custom silicon, synthetic data, & energy constraints on scaling

- Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much

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 out there on how LLMs are trained, what

Here is my episode with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind

We discuss:

* Why scaling is an artform

* Adding search, planning, & AlphaZero type training atop LLMs

* Making sure rogue nations can't

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 of the internet is quite an open ended

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?, especially in the context of how the insightsGOAT:>

This is a narration of my blog post, Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.

You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/lyndon-johnson

Listen on Apple Podcasts,

This is a narration of my blog post, Will scaling work?.

You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-work

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast

A true honor to speak with Jung Chang.

She is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (sold 15+ million copies worldwide) and Mao: The Unknown Story.

We discuss:

- what it was like growing up

Andrew Roberts is the world's best biographer and one of the leading historians of our time.

We discussed

* Churchill the applied historian,

* Napoleon the startup founder,

* why Nazi ideology cost

Here is my interview with Dominic Cummings on why Western governments are so dangerously broken, and how to fix them before an even more catastrophic crisis.

Dominic was Chief Advisor to the Prime

Paul Christiano is the world’s leading AI safety researcher. My full episode with him is out!

We discuss:

- Does he regret inventing RLHF, and is alignment necessarily dual-use?

- Why he has relatively

I had a lot of fun chatting with Shane Legg - Founder and Chief AGI Scientist, Google DeepMind!

We discuss:

* Why he expects AGI around 2028

* How to align superhuman models

* What new architectures

I had a lot of fun chatting with Grant Sanderson (who runs the excellent 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel) about:

- Whether advanced math requires AGI

- What careers should mathematically talented students

I learned so much from Sarah Paine, Professor of History and Strategy at the Naval War College.

We discuss:

- how continental vs maritime powers think and how this explains Xi & Putin's decisions

- how

Here is my conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.

Dario is hilarious and has fascinating takes on what these models are doing, why they scale so well, and what it will take to align

A few weeks ago, I sat beside Andy Matuschak to record how he reads a textbook.

Even though my own job is to learn things, I was shocked with how much more intense, painstaking, and effective his

The second half of my 7 hour conversation with Carl Shulman is out!

My favorite part! And the one that had the biggest impact on my worldview.

Here, Carl lays out how an AI takeover might happen:

* AI

In terms of the depth and range of topics, this episode is the best I’ve done.

No part of my worldview is the same after talking with Carl Shulman. He's the most interesting intellectual you've never

It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

We discuss

- similarities between AI progress & Manhattan Project

For 4 hours, I tried to come up reasons for why AI might not kill us all, and Eliezer Yudkowsky explained why I was wrong.

We also discuss his call to halt AI, why LLMs make alignment harder, what it

I went over to the OpenAI offices in San Fransisco to ask the Chief Scientist and cofounder of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, about:

* time to AGI

* leaks and spies

* what's after generative models

* post AGI

It is said that the two greatest problems of history are: how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall. If so, then the volcanic ashes spewed by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD -

I flew out to Chicago to interview Brett Harrison, who is the former President of FTX US President and founder of Architect.

In his first longform interview since the fall of FTX, he speak in great

My podcast with the brilliant Marc Andreessen is out!

We discuss:

* how AI will revolutionize software

* whether NFTs are useless, & whether he should be funding flying cars instead

* a16z's biggest

Garett Jones is an economist at George Mason University and the author of The Cultural Transplant, Hive Mind, and 10% Less Democracy.

This episode was fun and interesting throughout!

He explains:

* Why

One of my best episodes ever. Lars Doucet is the author of Land is a Big Deal, a book about Georgism which has been praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, and Noah Smith. Sam Altman is the lead

Holden Karnofsky is the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy and co-founder of GiveWell. He is also the author of one of the most interesting blogs on the internet, Cold Takes.

We discuss:

* Are we living in

This was one of my favorite episodes ever.

Bethany McLean was the first reporter to question Enron’s earnings, and she has written some of the best finance books out there.

We discuss:

* The astounding

Nadia Asparouhova is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like at nadia.xyz. She is also the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software.

We talk

Perhaps the most interesting episode so far.

Byrne Hobart writes at thediff.co, analyzing inflections in finance and tech.

He explains:

* What happened at FTX

* How drugs have induced past financial

Edward Glaeser is the chair of the Harvard department of economics, and the author of the best books and papers about cities (including Survival of the City and Triumph of the City).

He explains why:

*

I had a fascinating discussion about Robert Moses and The Power Broker with Professor Kenneth T. Jackson.

He's the pre-eminent historian on NYC and author of Robert Moses and The Modern City: The

It was a pleasure to welcome Brian Potter on the podcast! Brian is the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he discusses why the construction industry has been slow to

It was a fantastic pleasure to welcome Bryan Caplan back for a third time on the podcast! His most recent book is Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice.

He explains why he thinks:

- Feminists

It was my great pleasure to speak once again to Tyler Cowen. His most recent book is Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World.

We discuss:

- how sex is more pessimistic

Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. 

We discuss:

* why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make

Austin Vernon is an engineer working on a new method for carbon capture, and he has one of the most interesting blogs on the internet, where he writes about engineering, software, economics, and

Steve Hsu is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University and cofounder of the company Genomic Prediction.

We go deep into the weeds on how embryo selection can make babies

Will MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist movement and the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future.

We talk about improving the future, risk of extinction & collapse,

Joseph Carlsmith is a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy and a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Oxford.

We discuss utopia, artificial intelligence, computational power of

Fin Moorhouse is a Research Scholar and assistant to Toby Ord at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. He co-hosts the Hear This Idea podcast, which showcases new thinking in philosophy,

Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of History at Louisiana State University and the author of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History.

He explains the global ramifications of the Napoleonic Wars - from

I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX! He talks about FTX’s plan to infiltrate traditional finance, giving $100m this year to AI + pandemic risk, scaling slowly +

Agustin Lebron began his career as a trader and researcher at Jane Street Capital, one of the largest market-making firms in the world. He currently runs the consulting firm Essilen Research, where

Ananyo Bhattacharya is the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. He is a science writer who has worked at the Economist and Nature. Before journalism, he was a

Stephen Grugett is a cofounder of Manifold Markets, where anyone can create a prediction market. We discuss how prediction markets can change how countries and companies make important decisions.

Today I talk to Pradyu Prasad (blogger and podcaster) about the book "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan" by Herbert P. Bix. We also discuss militarization, industrial capacity,

Razib Khan is a writer, geneticist, and blogger with an interest in history, genetics, culture, and evolutionary psychology.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast

Jimmy Soni is the author of The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast

I interview the economist Bryan Caplan about his new book, Labor Econ Versus the World, and many other related topics.

Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New

Richard Hanania is the President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and the author of Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons

David Deutsch is the founder of the field of quantum computing and the author The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality.

Read me contra David on AI.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple

Byrne Hobart writes The Diff, a newsletter about inflections in finance and technology with 24,000+ subscribers.  

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.

David Friedman is a famous anarcho-capitalist economist and legal scholar.  

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.

Episode website + transcript here.
David

Sarah Fitz-Claridge is a writer, coach, and speaker with a fallibilist worldview. She started the journal that became Taking Children Seriously in the early 1990s after being surprised by the heated

Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than sixty academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political

Robert Martin (aka Uncle Bob) is a programming pioneer and bestselling author or Clean Code. We discuss the prospect of automating programming, spotting and developing coding talent, occupational

Scott Aaronson is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. 

He's the author of one of the most interesting blogs on

Scott is the author of Ultralearning and famous for the MIT Challenge, where he taught himself MIT's 4 year Computer Science curriculum in 1 year.

I had a blast chatting with Scott Young about

I ask Charles Murray about Human Accomplishment, By The People, and The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead.  

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Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University and with Tyler Cowen a founder of the online education platform http://MRU.org.

I ask Alex Tabarrok about the Grand Innovation

Caleb Watney is the director of innovation policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.

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Episode website here.
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Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of The Elephant in the Brain and The Age of Em.  

Robin's Twitter: https://twitter.com/robinhanson

Robin's blog:

Jason Crawford writes at The Roots of Progress about the history of technology and industry and the philosophy of progress.  

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Matjaž Leonardis has co-written a paper with David Deutsch about the Popper-Miller Theorem. In this episode, we talk about that as well as the dangers of the scientific identity, the nature of

Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Director of the Mercatus Center.

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Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. His most famous works include: The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to HaveThe>New>