PODCAST · technology
Dwarkesh Podcast
by Dwarkesh Patel
Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com
Episodes
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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 some hundreds of Conquistadors landed on a new continent they knew basically nothing about, and within 2 and a half years, conquered…
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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 automate AI research. And we also discuss how we will know if the models are actually aligned before we kick off RSI. Watch on YouTube; read...
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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 companies, because I wanted to hear the details of what's actually happening at the frontier and what comes next. Watch on YouTube; read...
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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 program at what is now Coefficient Giving. She is one the three authors of METR and Redwood Research’s “Brief independent investigation…
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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 subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com
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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 RSI draws near; and how Anthropic and OpenAI are on track to control most of the world’s usable FLOPs within the next few years…
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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 Large Language Models", and is currently working on a third party investigation into the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident. In my opinion, he's…
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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
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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. Mercury’s built-in AI, Command, helps me close my books and saves me a bunch of time. At the end of each month, Command categorizes my...
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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 elegance by taking the 20-lecture graduate course Adam taught on it at Stanford. But in this episode, Adam distills the key idea at its...
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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 concretely, what AI progress in other fields will look like. Even within mathematics, there’s a jagged landscape. What does it look like? What…
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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 dedicated email address, and when they send an invoice, Mercury automatically creates a draft payment for me to review. I no longer have...
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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 platform. And since I use Mercury to run basically my entire business, Command has access to all the info it needs to get real work…
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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 diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones…
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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 the optimal way to tax and redistribute the wealth that will be generated? How should countries not in the AI supply chain index into…
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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 brain each look the way they do. Reiner is CEO of MatX, a new chip startup (full disclosure - I’m an angel investor). He was previously at...
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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 still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play. You have to go…
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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 selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution. By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical...
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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 can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations, public API prices, and some chalk. It’s a bit technical, but I...
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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 chips to China, why Nvidia doesn’t just become a hyperscaler, how it makes its investments, and much more. Enjoy! Watch on YouTube; read…
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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 scientific discovery. But it's also a surprisingly mysterious and elusive question when you look at the history of human science. We approach...
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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 make especially fast progress at scientific discovery because of tight verification loops. But the story of how we discovered the shape…
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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 economics of labs, hyperscalers, foundries, and fab equipment manufacturers. Learned a ton about every single level of the stack. Enjoy!…
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The most important question nobody's asking about AI
Read the full essay here: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic Timestamps (00:00:00) - Anthropic vs The Pentagon (00:04:16) - The overhangs of tyranny (00:05:54) - AI structurally favors mass surveillance (00:08:25) - Alignment...to whom? (00:13:55) - Coordination not worth the costs This is…
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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 the University of Chicago). Some especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the...
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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 what to make of the scaling hypothesis in the current RL regime, why task-specific RL might lead to generalization, and how AI will…
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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, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more. Watch on...
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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 and has worked on everything from brain-computer interfaces to quantum computing to nanotech and even formal mathematics. In this…
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Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)
Read the essay here. Timestamps 00:00:00 What are we scaling? 00:03:11 The value of human labor 00:05:04 Economic diffusion lag is cope00:06:34 Goal-post shifting is justified 00:08:23 RL scaling 00:09:18 Broadly deployed intelligence explosion This is a public episode. If you would like to…
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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 the Soviet Union’s collapse, diving into the role of the US, the Sino-Soviet border conflict, the oil bust, ethnic rebellions and even…
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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 YouTube; read the transcript. Sponsors * Gemini 3 is the first model I’ve used that can find connections I haven’t anticipated. I recently…
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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. Microsoft is building multiple Fairwaters, each of which has hundreds of thousands of GB200s & GB300s. Between all these interconnected...
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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 century. This lecture was particularly interesting to me because, in my opinion, the Chinese Civil War is 1 of the top 3 most important events...
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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 blend into the previous ~2.5 centuries of 2% GDP growth, why self driving took so long to crack, and what he sees as the future of...
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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 vents. Nick’s story may be wrong, but I find it remarkable that with just that starting point, you can explain so much about why life is…
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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 thoughts (00:03:22) - Imitation learning is continuous with and complementary to RL (00:08:26) - Continual learning (00:10:31) - Concluding...
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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. After interviewing him, my steel man of Richard’s position is this: LLMs aren’t capable of learning on-the-job, so no matter how much we...
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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” for general-purpose robots. His median estimate for when robots will be able to run households entirely autonomously? 2030. If Sergey’s...
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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. She then applies this framework to today, arguing that Russia and China are similarly constrained by their geography, making them…
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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 for longevity. We also talk about why drug discovery has been getting exponentially harder, and what a new platform for biological...
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China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer
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 Industries) walks me through how we can pull it off, and why he thinks a major part of this energy…
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Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard
A deep dive with Lewis Bollard, who leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farmed Animal Welfare, on the surprising economics of the meat industry. Why is factory farming so efficient? How can we make the lives of the 23+ billion animals living on factory farms more bearable? How far off are the...
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Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China
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 series: she graciously agreed, and we’ll be releasing the results online over the coming weeks and…
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Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history
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 individual had more of a profound impact on the 20th century than Stalin. He held the power of life and death...
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Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner
I’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away - others 2 years. Here’s an audio version of where my thoughts stand as of June 2025. If you want to read the original post, you can check it out here. This is a public episode.…
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A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church
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 improvements (e.g., orders of magnitude decrease in sequencing & synthesis costs, precise gene editing tools...
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Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber
Arthur Kroeber is a leading researcher on Chinese tech and macro, a founding partner at Gavekal Dragonomics, and author of "China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know." It's the most useful, detailed resource I've found of how China actually works. On this episode, we discuss how China achieved...
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"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff
Ken Rogoff is the former chief economist of the IMF, a professor of Economics at Harvard, and author of the newly released Our Dollar, Your Problem and This Time is Different. On this episode, Ken predicts that, within the next decade, the US will have a debt-induced inflation crisis, but not a...
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Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih
On this episode, I chat with Victor Shih about all things China. We discuss China’s massive local debt crisis, the CCP’s views on AI, what happens after Xi, and more. Victor Shih is an expert on the Chinese political system, as well as their banking and fiscal policies, and he has amassed more...
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Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken
New episode with my good friends Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken. Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton researches mechanistic interpretability, both at Anthropic. We talk through what’s changed in the last year of AI research; the new RL regime and how far it can scale; how to trace a…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Deeply researched interviews
www.dwarkesh.com
HOSTED BY
Dwarkesh Patel
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Dwarkesh Podcast currently has 142 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com
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Dwarkesh Podcast publishes regularly with 142 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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Who hosts Dwarkesh Podcast?
Dwarkesh Podcast is created and hosted by Dwarkesh Patel.
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