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Episodes from Dwarkesh Podcast
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 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 predictions.And the reasons it survives this epistemic hell is...
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, 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 it came time to issue 1099s this...
The most important question nobody's asking about AI
Read the full essay here: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropicTimestamps(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
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 expensive, and so you had to make this big upfront CAPEX decision to print a...
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 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 the RL tasks and environments you need. Their massive...
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 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 everything so much simpler. Apply now at mercury.com/personal-banking<p...
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-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 out, they’re all the same question.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.S...
Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)
Read the essay here.Timestamps00:00:00 What are we scaling?00:03:11 The value of human labor00:05:04 Economic diffusion lag is cope00:06:34 Goal-post shifting is justified00:08:23 RL scaling00:09:18 Broadly deployed intelligence explosion Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War
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 moment to thank Sarah for doing this with me...
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* 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 gemini.google* Labelbox helped me creat...
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, 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.Satya then answered a bunch of questions about how Microsoft is preparing for AGI across all la...
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 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.SponsorsMercury helps you run your business better. It’s the banking platform we use for th...