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...

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...

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 this out....

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...

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...

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,...

This is a narration of my blog post, Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/lyndon-johnson Listen 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

This is a narration of my blog post, Will scaling work?. You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-work Listen 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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 more Watch 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...

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 more Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Full...

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...

George Hotz and Eliezer Yudkowsky hashed out their positions on AI safety. It was a really fun debate. No promises but there might be a round 2 where we better hone in on the cruxes that we began to identify here. Watch the livestreamed YouTube version (high quality video will be up next week). Catch the Twitter stream. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Transcript here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get...

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. --- I’m running an experiment on this episode. I’m not doing an ad. Instead, I’m just going to ask you to pay for whatever value you feel you personally got out of this conversation. Pay here: https://bit.ly/3ONINtp --- Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast...

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...

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, etc Plus we talk about a whole bunch of weird...

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...

It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb We 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...

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...

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 AI 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. As always, the most helpful...

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...