Dwarkesh Podcast

I talked with Patrick McKenzie (known online as patio11) about how a small team he ran over a Discord server got vaccines into Americans' arms: A story of broken incentives, outrageous incompetence, and how a few individuals with high agency saved 1000s of lives.

Enjoy!

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.

Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from...

I chatted with Tony Blair about:

- What he learned from Lee Kuan Yew

- Intelligence agencies track record on Iraq & Ukraine

- What he tells the dozens of world leaders who come seek advice from him

- How much of a PM’s time is actually spent governing

- What will AI’s July 1914 moment look like from inside the Cabinet?

Enjoy!

Watch the video on YouTube. Read the full transcript here.

Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Spon...

Here is my conversation with Francois Chollet and Mike Knoop on the $1 million ARC-AGI Prize they're launching today.

I did a bunch of socratic grilling throughout, but Francois’s arguments about why LLMs won’t lead to AGI are very interesting and worth thinking through.

It was really fun discussing/debating the cruxes. Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) – The ARC benchmark

(00:11:10) – Why LLMs struggle with ARC

(00:19:00) – Skill vs intelligence

(00:27:55...

Chatted with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner on the trillion dollar nationalized cluster, CCP espionage at AI labs, how unhobblings and scaling can lead to 2027 AGI, dangers of outsourcing clusters to Middle East, leaving OpenAI, and situational awareness.

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. Follow Leopold on Twitter.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) – The trillion-dollar cluster and unhobbling

(00:20:31) – AI 2028: The return of history

(00:40:26) – Espionage & American AI superiority

(01:08:20) – Geopolitical implications of AI

...

Chatted with John Schulman (cofounded OpenAI and led ChatGPT creation) on how posttraining tames the shoggoth, and the nature of the progress to come...

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) - Pre-training, post-training, and future capabilities

(00:16:57) - Plan for AGI 2025

(00:29:19) - Teaching models to reason

(00:40:50) - The Road to ChatGPT

(00:52:13) - What makes for a good RL researcher?

(01:00:58) - Keeping humans in t...

Mark Zuckerberg on:

- Llama 3

- open sourcing towards AGI

- custom silicon, synthetic data, & energy constraints on scaling

- Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much more

Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Human edited transcript with helpful links here.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Llama 3

(00:08:32) - Coding on path to AGI

(00:25:24) - Energy bottlenecks

(00:33:20) - Is AI the most important technology ever?

(00:37:21) - Dangers of open source

Had so much fun chatting with my good friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas on the podcast.

No way to summarize it, except: 

This is the best context dump out there on how LLMs are trained, what capabilities they're likely to soon have, and what exactly is going on inside them.

You would be shocked how much of what I know about this field, I've learned just from talking with them.

To the extent that you've enjoyed my other AI interviews, now you know why.

So excited to put t...

Here is my episode with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind

We discuss:

* Why scaling is an artform

* Adding search, planning, & AlphaZero type training atop LLMs

* Making sure rogue nations can't steal weights

* The right way to align superhuman AIs and do an intelligence explosion

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.

Timestamps

(0:00:00) - Nature of intelligence

(0:05:56) - RL atop LLMs

(0:16:31) - Scaling and alignment

(0:24:13) - Time...

We discuss:

* what it takes to process $1 trillion/year

* how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships

* what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is quite an open ended prompt, and the Collison brothers are just getting started).

Plus the amazing stuff they're doing at Arc Institute, the financial infrastructure for AI agents, playing devil's advocate against progress studies, and much more.

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 f...

It was a great pleasure speaking with Tyler Cowen for the 3rd time.

We discussed GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?, especially in the context of how the insights of Hayek, Keynes, Smith, and other great economists help us make sense of AI, growth, animal spirits, prediction markets, alignment, central planning, and much more.

The topics covered in this episode are too many to summarize. Hope you enjoy!

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here...