PODCAST

Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Patel

Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com

technology

All Episodes

25:43

Will scaling work? [Narration]

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2024/01/19

This is a narration of my blog post, Will scaling work?. You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-workListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future posts and episodes. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

91:15

Jung Chang - Living through Cultural Revolution and...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/11/29

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 during the Cultural Revolution as the daughter of a denounced official- why the CCP continues to worship the biggest mass murderer in human history.- how exactly Communist totalitarianism was able to subjugate a billion people- why Chinese leaders like Xi and Deng who suffered from the Cultural

78:49

Andrew Roberts - SV's Napoleon Cult, Why Hitler Lost...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/11/22

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 Hitler WW2,* drones, reconnaissance, and other aspects of the future of war,* Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Ukraine, & Taiwan.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(00:00:00)

154:13

Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/11/15

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 Minister during COVID, and before that, director of Vote Leave (which masterminded the 2016 Brexit referendum).Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(00:00:00) - One day

187:01

Paul Christiano - Preventing an AI Takeover

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/10/31

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 modest timelines (40% by 2040, 15% by 2030),- What do we want post-AGI world to look like (do we want to keep gods enslaved forever)?- Why he’s leading the push to get to labs develop responsible scaling policies, and what it would take to prevent an AI coup or bioweapon,- His current research into a new

44:19

Shane Legg (DeepMind Founder) - 2028 AGI, New...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/10/26

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 needed for AGI* Has Deepmind sped up capabilities or safety more?* Why multimodality will be next big landmark* and much moreWatch full episode on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read full transcript here.Timestamps(0:00:00) - Measuring AGI(0:11:41) - Do we need new

91:20

Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) - Past, Present, &...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/10/12

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 pursue- Why Grant plans on doing a stint as a high school teacher- Tips for self teaching- Does Godel’s incompleteness theorem actually matter- Why are good explanations so hard to find?- And much moreWatch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Full transcript

144:33

Sarah C. M. Paine - WW2, Taiwan, Ukraine, & Maritime...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/10/04

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 a war with China over Taiwan would shake out and whether it could go nuclear- why the British Empire fell apart, why China went communist, how Hitler and Japan could have coordinated to win WW2, and whether Japanese occupation was good for Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria- plus other lessons from WW2, Cold

118:43

Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) - Scaling, Alignment, &...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/08/08

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 them.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Introduction(00:01:00) - Scaling(00:15:46) - Language(00:22:58) - Economic Usefulness(00:38:05) -

142:40

Andy Matuschak - Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, &...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/07/12

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 learning process was.So I asked if we could record a conversation about how he learns and a bunch of other topics:* How he identifies and interrogates his confusion (much harder than it seems, and requires an extremely effortful and slow pace)* Why memorization is essential to understanding and

187:07

Carl Shulman (Pt 2) - AI Takeover, Bio & Cyber...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/06/26

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 can threaten mutually assured destruction from bioweapons,* use cyber attacks to take over physical infrastructure,* build mechanical armies,* spread seed AIs we can never exterminate,* offer tech and other advantages to collaborating countries, etcPlus we talk about a whole bunch of weird and interesting

164:16

Carl Shulman (Pt 1) - Intelligence Explosion, Primate...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/06/14

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 heard of.We ended up talking for 8 hours, so I'm splitting this episode into 2 parts.This part is about Carl’s model of an intelligence explosion, which integrates everything from:* how fast algorithmic progress & hardware improvements in AI are happening,* what primate evolution suggests about the

157:36

Richard Rhodes - Making of Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2,...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/05/23

It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic BombWe discuss- similarities between AI progress & Manhattan Project (developing a powerful, unprecedented, & potentially apocalyptic technology within an uncertain arms-race situation)- visiting starving former Soviet scientists during fall of Soviet Union- whether Oppenheimer was a spy, & consulting on the Nolan movie- living through WW2 as a child- odds of nuclear war in

243:25

Eliezer Yudkowsky - Why AI Will Kill Us, Aligning...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/04/06

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 would take to save humanity, his millions of words of sci-fi, and much more.If you want to get to the crux of the conversation, fast forward to 2:35:00 through 3:43:54. Here we go through and debate the main reasons I still think doom is unlikely.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or

47:41

Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) - Building...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/03/27

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 futures* working with Microsoft and competing with Google* difficulty of aligning superhuman AIWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(00:00) - Time to AGI(05:57) -

98:23

Nat Friedman - Reading Ancient Scrolls, Open Source,...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/03/22

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 - which entomb the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in South Italy - hold history’s greatest prize. For beneath those ashes lies the only salvageable library from the classical world.Nat Friedman was the CEO of Github form 2018 to 2021. Before that, he started and sold two companies - Ximian and Xamarin. He

157:38

Brett Harrison - FTX US Former President & HFT...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/03/13

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 detail about his entire tenure there and about SBF’s dysfunctional leadership. He talks about how the inner circle of Gary Wang, Nishad Singh, and SBF mismanaged the company, controlled the codebase, got distracted by media, and even threatened him for his letter of resignation.In what was my favorite part

79:31

Marc Andreessen - AI, Crypto, 1000 Elon Musks,...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/02/01

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 vulnerabilities* the future of fusion, education, Twitter, venture, managerialism, & big techWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(0:00:17) - Chewing glass(0:04:21) -

74:01

Garett Jones - Immigration, National IQ, & Less...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/01/24

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 national IQ matters* How migrants bring their values to their new countries* Why we should have less democracy* How the Chinese are an unstoppable global force for free marketsWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Intro(00:01:08) -

100:23

Lars Doucet - Progress, Poverty, Georgism, & Why Rent...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2023/01/09

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 investor in his new startup, ValueBase.Talking with Lars completely changed how I think about who creates value in the world and who leeches off it.We go deep into the weeds on Georgism:* Why do even the wealthiest places in the world have poverty and homelessness, and why do rents increase as fast as

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