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Every episode
Dwarkesh Podcast
30 episodes
Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research?
Aug 11, 2026 · 2 hr 13 min
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…
8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning
Aug 7, 2026 · 9 min
Read the essay here. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x
Aug 3, 2026 · 11 min
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…
Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity
Jul 10, 2026 · 1 hr 38 min
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 resi…
Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math
Jun 30, 2026 · 1 hr 34 min
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…
The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job
Jun 26, 2026 · 20 min
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.com Timestamps: (00:00:00) – The big research bet the labs are maki…
The data black hole at the center of AI
Jun 19, 2026 · 12 min
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/command Timestamps: (00:00:00) – What is really driving AI progress…
Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
Jun 16, 2026 · 2 hr 8 min
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 ex…
Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
Jun 4, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
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 entir…
Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up
May 22, 2026 · 1 hr 21 min
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 c…
Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
May 15, 2026 · 2 hr 37 min
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 co…
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
May 8, 2026 · 2 hr 13 min
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…
Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served
Apr 29, 2026 · 2 hr 14 min
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 de…
Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat
Apr 15, 2026 · 1 hr 43 min
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 M…
Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses
Apr 7, 2026 · 2 hr 3 min
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-Morley experiment, which is supposed to have motivated special relativity, until after he had come up wi…
Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
Mar 20, 2026 · 1 hr 24 min
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) long. During this time, what we know today as the better theory can actually make worse prediction…
Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute
Mar 13, 2026 · 2 hr 31 min
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 tax season. Last year, I used Mercury to request W-9s from all the contractors I worked with. Then, when i…
The most important question nobody's asking about AI
Mar 11, 2026 · 25 min
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
Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
Mar 6, 2026 · 2 hr 2 min
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 did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices. This is because paper was still very e…
Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
Feb 13, 2026 · 2 hr 22 min
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 to profitability, and more. Watch on YouTube; read the transcript. Sponsors * Labelbox can get you…
Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
Feb 5, 2026 · 2 hr 50 min
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 banking with Mercury for business purposes, so getting to bank with them for my personal life makes ev…
Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain
Dec 30, 2025 · 1 hr 50 min
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 neuroscience, and the answer to Ilya’s question: how does the genome encode abstract reward functions? Turns ou…
Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)
Dec 23, 2025 · 12 min
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
Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War
Dec 19, 2025 · 1 hr 55 min
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 potentially at the beginning of another Cold War. As we wrap up this lecture series, I want to take a…
Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
Nov 25, 2025 · 1 hr 36 min
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 generated the relevant charts and ran toy ML experiments for me with zero bugs. Try Gemini 3 today at g…
Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI
Nov 12, 2025 · 1 hr 28 min
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 of these Fairwater buildings is more powerful than any other AI datacenter that currently exists. Sa…
Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise
Oct 31, 2025 · 1 hr 31 min
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 role in the whole thing. Watch on YouTube; read the transcript. Sponsors Mercury helps you run your bu…
Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
Oct 17, 2025 · 2 hr 25 min
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 * Labelbox helps you get data that is more detailed, more accurate, and higher signal than you could get by def…
Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable
Oct 10, 2025 · 1 hr 20 min
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 two sexes? Why sex at all? * Why are bacteria so simple despite being around for 4 billion years? Wh…
Some thoughts on the Sutton interview
Oct 4, 2025 · 12 min
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
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