Dwarkesh Podcast

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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Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute

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...

2026-03-14

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The most important question nobody's asking about AI

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 ...

2026-03-12

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Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

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 especial...

2026-03-07

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Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"

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 i...

2026-02-14

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Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

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 humano...

2026-02-06

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Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain

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...

2025-12-31

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Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

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...

2025-12-24

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Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War

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...

2025-12-20

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Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

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 * G...

2025-11-26

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Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI

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...

2025-11-13

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Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

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 inter...

2025-10-31

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Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

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 centurie...

2025-10-18

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Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

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 ...

2025-10-10

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Some thoughts on the Sutton interview

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 i...

2025-10-05

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Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end. After interviewing him, my steel man of Ri...

2025-09-26

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Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Sergey Levine, one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose robots. His median est...

2025-09-12

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How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. She then applies this framework to today,...

2025-09-05

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Dwarkesh Podcast

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