Dwarkesh Podcast

97:23

Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/10/01

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 the 6 million strong Aztec empire.Then, a decade later, Francisco Pizarro did the same thing to an Incan Empire of some 10 million inhabitants.In both cases, the Conquistadors consistently beat native armies

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80:10

Noam Brown – Agent swarms, alignment, & recursive...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/09/17

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 the transcript.Sponsors* Jane Street has been interested in AI for a lot longer than you’d think, and not just for trading. In 2011, a full year before AlexNet and over a decade before ChatGPT launched, they

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97:01

AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/09/11

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 the transcript.Sponsors* Antithesis helps you trust your code. As agents generate more and more of your software, the bottleneck shifts from your engineers actually writing code to verifying it. Antithesis

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140:33

Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/09/01

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 of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident”.We go through not only what she and her coauthors discovered during this investigation, but what it means for

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24:40

The rise and fall of agent civilizations

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/08/31

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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76:53

Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/08/25

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 (because they can monetize compute better and thus outbid everyone).And then we discuss whether the >$10T of total AI capex we’ll see by the end of the decade will cause a sovereign debt crisis, where hyperscaler

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132:32

Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/08/11

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 one of the most interesting thinkers on the future of AI.Had him 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

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8:37

8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/08/07

Read the essay here. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

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11:18

Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/08/03

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 transactions and provides its rationale for every choice: I just review, fix anything that’s off, and approve... and then Mercury syncs everything to QuickBooks. Get started at mercury.com/command Get full

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98:24

Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/07/10

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, Einstein is trying to figure out the principle behind a particular coincidence: that the mass that resists

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93:39

Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/06/30

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 different are they from what AIs are currently able to do?Does AI (on net) increase or decrease human

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19:53

The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/06/26

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 handles it all. Learn more at mercury.comTimestamps:(00:00:00) – The big research bet the labs are

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11:57

The data black hole at the center of AI

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/06/19

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 handles it. Learn more at mercury.com/commandTimestamps:(00:00:00) – What is really driving AI

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128:20

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/06/16

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 Florence and, wrongly suspecting Machiavelli of participating in a coup attempt, fired, tortured, and exiled

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76:08

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/06/04

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 obvious answers, but the first thing economics teaches you is that your intuitions can often be entirely

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80:30

Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/05/22

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 YouTube so you can see the chalkboard. Read the transcript.Sponsors* Crusoe was one of only five GPU clouds

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157:29

Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/05/15

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 AlphaGo works, it gave us the context to have a discussion about how RL works in LLMs and how it could

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133:20

David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/05/08

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 Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago).That’s when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body

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133:50

Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/04/29

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 understand the full stack of AI, from chip design to model architecture, as well as Reiner. It was a real delight

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103:12

Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2026/04/15

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 deployment scheduled for later this year. But hardware is only part of the story—for inference, Crusoe’s

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