Dwarkesh Podcast

AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

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...

2026-09-12

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Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face

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 Givi...

2026-09-01

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The rise and fall of agent civilizations

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 epi...

2026-09-01

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Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028

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...

2026-08-25

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Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research?

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 w...

2026-08-12

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8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning

Read the essay 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

2026-08-08

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Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x

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 m...

2026-08-04

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Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity

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 grad...

2026-07-11

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Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math

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 ...

2026-06-30

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The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job

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 the...

2026-06-26

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The data black hole at the center of AI

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 ...

2026-06-20

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Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

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 whic...

2026-06-17

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Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?

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 redistribu...

2026-06-05

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Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

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 i...

2026-05-22

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Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

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 t...

2026-05-16

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David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution

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 sinc...

2026-05-09

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Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served

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 doin...

2026-04-30

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Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat

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 be...

2026-04-15

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Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses

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 surpr...

2026-04-07

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Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery

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 scien...

2026-03-21

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Dwarkesh Podcast

Episodes (140 episodes)

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