Dwarkesh Podcast
npub13w96pnfymuhxdmmawesmxdlwc4xeae2u4zzqnx385sa38rghpyeqxyy9gl@drss.io
Deeply researched interviews [www.dwarkesh.com](https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast)
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Ryan Greenblatt – Human level AIs might build runaway superintelligences by 2032
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11 Aug 2026
Had Ryan Greenblatt on to discuss/debate recursive self-improvement. This might be the most important question in the world right now – whether within a year or so of achieving human-level
8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning
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7 Aug 2026
Read the essay [here](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/era-of-continual-learning). Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at
Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x
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3 Aug 2026
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](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/why-compute-might-get-10x-more-expensive). Thanks to
Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity
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10 Jul 2026
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 elegance by taking the 20-lecture
Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math
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30 Jun 2026
Always so much fun to chat with [Grant](https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown). AI has been making much faster progress in math than in other fields. As a result, mathematics is showing us, very
The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job
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26 Jun 2026
Read it [here](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm). Thanks to Mercury for sponsoring this essay. [Mercury](https://mercury.com/) has automated basically my entire bill pay process for my
The data black hole at the center of AI
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19 Jun 2026
Read the [transcript](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-sample-efficiency-black-hole-2) here. Thanks to [Mercury](https://mercury.com) for sponsoring this essay! Mercury just released a new feature
Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
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16 Jun 2026
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 diplomat for Florence, a position from
Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
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4 Jun 2026
Economics of AGI episode w [Alex Imas](https://www.aleximas.com/) and [Phil Trammell](https://philiptrammell.com/). There’s a bunch of important questions about how we deal with AI that only
Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up
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22 May 2026
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 brain each look the way they do.
Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
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15 May 2026
[Eric Jang](https://evjang.com/) walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools. Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward. AlphaGo is still the
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
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8 May 2026
[David Reich](https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/) is back. He and collaborator [Ali Akbari](https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/people/ali-akbari) just [published a
Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served
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29 Apr 2026
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 can deduce about what the labs are
Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat
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15 Apr 2026
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 chips to China, why Nvidia doesn’t
Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses
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7 Apr 2026
Really enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress. It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop for scientific discovery. But it's also a
Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
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20 Mar 2026
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 make especially fast progress at
Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute
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13 Mar 2026
[Dylan Patel](https://x.com/dylan522p?lang=en), founder of [SemiAnalysis](https://semianalysis.com/), provides a deep dive into the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute: logic, memory, and power.
The most important question nobody's asking about AI
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11 Mar 2026
Read the full essay here: [https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic) Timestamps (00:00:00) - Anthropic vs The Pentagon (00:04:16) - The overhangs of
Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
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6 Mar 2026
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with [Ada Palmer](https://www.adapalmer.com/) (historian, novelist, and composer based at the
Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
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13 Feb 2026
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 what to make of the scaling
Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
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5 Feb 2026
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, what it would take to manufacture
Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain
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30 Dec 2025
[Adam Marblestone](https://twitter.com/AdamMarblestone) is CEO of [Convergent Research](https://www.convergentresearch.org/). He’s had a very interesting past life: he was a research scientist at
Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)
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23 Dec 2025
Read the essay [here](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-on-ai-progress-dec-2025-video). Timestamps 00:00:00 What are we scaling? 00:03:11 The value of human labor 00:05:04 Economic diffusion
Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War
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19 Dec 2025
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 the Soviet Union’s collapse,
Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
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25 Nov 2025
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
Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI
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12 Nov 2025
As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of [SemiAnalysis](https://semianalysis.com/)) and me an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter. Microsoft
Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise
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31 Oct 2025
In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for over a century. This lecture was
Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
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17 Oct 2025
The [Andrej Karpathy](https://x.com/karpathy) episode. During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will just blend into
Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable
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10 Oct 2025
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 vents. Nick’s story may be wrong, but
Some thoughts on the Sutton interview
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4 Oct 2025
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 thoughts (00:03:22) - Imitation
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
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26 Sep 2025
Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of [The Bitter Lesson.](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html) And he thinks
Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine
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12 Sep 2025
[Sergey Levine](https://x.com/svlevine), one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of [Physical Intelligence](https://www.physicalintelligence.company/), thinks we’re on the cusp
How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine
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5 Sep 2025
In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. She then applies this framework to
Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel
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21 Aug 2025
[Jacob Kimmel](https://x.com/jacobkimmel) 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 for
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer
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15 Aug 2025
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 JPL, founder & CEO of Terraform
Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard
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7 Aug 2025
A deep dive with Lewis Bollard, who leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for [Farmed Animal Welfare](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/farm-animal-welfare/), on the surprising economics of the
Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China
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25 Jul 2025
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 immediately invited her back for another
Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history
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10 Jul 2025
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 volume in the works). No other
Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner
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3 Jul 2025
I’ve had a lot of discussions on [my podcast](https://www.youtube.com/@DwarkeshPatel) where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think [it’s 20 years
A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church
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26 Jun 2025
George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades. Professor Church thinks that these
Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber
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19 Jun 2025
Arthur Kroeber is a leading researcher on Chinese tech and macro, a founding partner at [Gavekal Dragonomics](https://research.gavekal.com/), and author of ["China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to
"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff
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12 Jun 2025
[Ken Rogoff](https://rogoff.scholars.harvard.edu/) is the former chief economist of the IMF, a professor of Economics at Harvard, and author of the newly released [Our Dollar, Your
Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih
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29 May 2025
On this episode, I chat with [Victor Shih](https://gps.ucsd.edu/faculty-directory/victor-shih.html) about all things China. We discuss China’s massive local debt crisis, the CCP’s views on AI,
Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken
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22 May 2025
New episode with my good friends [Sholto Douglas](https://x.com/_sholtodouglas?lang=en) & [Trenton Bricken](https://x.com/trentonbricken?lang=en). Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton
What will automated firms look like?
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1 May 2025
Based on my essay about [AI firms.](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ai-firm) Huge thanks to [Petr](https://www.petrsalaba.cz/) and his team for bringing this to life! Watch on
Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 months
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29 Apr 2025
Zuck on: \* Llama 4, benchmark gaming \* Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI \* DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump \* Orion glasses, AI relationships, and preventing
Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper
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24 Apr 2025
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
AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu
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17 Apr 2025
[Ege Erdil](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/ege-erdil) and [Tamay Besiroglu](https://tamaybesiroglu.com/) have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an
AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
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3 Apr 2025
[Scott](https://www.astralcodexten.com/) and [Daniel](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-kokotajlo) break down every month from now until the 2027 intelligence explosion. Scott Alexander is
