Dwarkesh Podcast

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 the way that it is — the things you’re supposed to just take as givens in biology class: * Why are there...

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

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 scale, we’ll need some new architecture to enable continual learning. And once we have it, we won’t need a...

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 right, the world 5 years from now will be an insanely different place than it is today. This conversatio...

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 vulnerable in any conflict with maritime powers (like the U.S. and its allies). Watch on YouTube ; listen on Ap...

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 understanding to speed up progress would look like. As a bonus, we get into the nitty gritty of gene delivery...

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 singularity will be powered by solar. His views are contrarian, but he came armed to defend them. Watch on YouTu...

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 moonshots (e.g., brainless chickens, cultivated meats, etc.) to end this mass suffering? And why does...

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 months! This first lecture is focused on the balance of power in East Asia at the turn of the 20th century....

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 over every single person across 11 time zones, and he killed tens of millions of people, utterly consum...

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

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 like CRISPR, AlphaFold-type AIs, & the ability to conduct massively parallel multiplex experiments) ha...

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 high-tech manufacturing dominance, and where they'll go from here. By Arthur’s account, the Chinese g...

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 Japan-type financial crisis (the latter is much worse, and can make a country poorer for generations)....

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 biographical data on the Chinese elite than anyone else in the world. He teaches at UC San Diego, where h...

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 model’s thoughts; and how countries, workers, and students should prepare for AGI. See you next year for v3....

Based on my essay about AI firms. Huge thanks to Petr and his team for bringing this to life! Watch on YouTube . Thanks to Google for sponsoring. We used their Veo 2 model to make this entire video—it generated everything from the photorealistic humans to the claymation octopuses. If you’re a Gemini Advanced user, you can try Veo 2 now in the Gemini app. Just select Veo 2 in the dropdown, and type...

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 tech. Watch on Youtube ; listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify . ---------- SPONSORS * Scale is building the infrastructure for safer, smarter AI. Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to...

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 devastated by famine and disease. I chatted with historian Kyle Harper about this and much else: * Rome as a massive slave society * Why humans are more disease-prone than other animals * How agriculture made...

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 growth (economy literally doubling every year or two). This discussion offers a totally different scenario than my recent interview with Scott and Daniel . Ege and Tamay are the co-founders of Mechanize...

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 Kokotajlo resigned from OpenAI in 2024, rejecting a non-disparagement clause and risking millions in equity to speak out about AI safety. We discuss misaligned hive minds, Xi and Trump waking up, and automat...

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 some other nonsense. My book, “ The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 ” is available in digital format now. Preorders for the print version are also open! Watch on YouTube ; listen on Apple P...

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 evolution deeply mysterious. How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error? Has the human brain declined in size over the last...

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 . ---------- Timestamps (0:00:00) - Intro (0:00:32) - Scale (0:05:50) - Vibes (0:11:14) - Youngsters (0:14:27) - Tech & AI (0:15:47) - Hearts & Minds (0:17:07) - On Travel Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

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 other way around. Watch on Youtube ; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . ---------- Sponsors Scale partners with major AI labs like Meta, Google Deepmind, and OpenAI. Through Scale’s Data Foundry,...