Dwarkesh Podcast

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 heart so clearly and compellingly that even I could keep up lol. At the core of general relativity, Ein...

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 is the nature of the most important conceptual breakthroughs in the history of mathematics, and how di...

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 to hunt through my inbox for invoices or deal with messy spreadsheets to track my bills. Mercury hand...

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 done. I can ask it to send invoices, or categorize expenses, or even transfer money… and Command just handl...

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 who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence. In 1513 the Medici retook control of Flor...

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 the gains? Is there any world where inequality doesn’t explode? It might seem like these questions have...

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 Google, where he worked on software efficiency , compilers, and TPU architecture. Watch this one on Yo...

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 back to 2017 to get insight into how the more general AIs of the future might learn. Once he explained how...

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 method, they found that selection has actually sped up. Selection went especially bonkers during the Br...

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 encourage you to hang in there – it’s really worth it. There are less than a handful of people who understa...

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 the transcript . Sponsors * Crusoe’s cloud runs on state-of-the-art Blackwell GPUs, with Vera Rubin depl...

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 this question stories like Einstein (who claimed that he hadn't even heard of the famous Michelson-Morl...

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 of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia...

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! Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Mercury has already saved me a bunch of time this ta...

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 Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

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 Renaissance : Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so di...

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 diffuse throughout the economy. We also dive into Anthropic’s revenue projections, compute commitments, path...

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 YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Mercury just started offering personal banking! I’m already...

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 episode, we discuss how the brain learns so much from so little, what the AI field can learn from neuroscien...

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 Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

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 the Roman Catholic Church. As she points out, this is all particularly interesting as we find ourselves p...

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 wrote a blog post on RL’s information efficiency, and Gemini 3 helped me think it all through. It also g...

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 buildings, they’ll have over 2 GW of total capacity. Just to give a frame of reference, even a single one...

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 of the 20th century. And to understand why it transpired as it did, you need to understand Stalin’s ro...

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 education. It was a pleasure chatting with him. Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Labelbo...