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 situationa

John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) - Reasoning, RLHF, & Plan for 2027 AGI

23 days ago 1h 36m

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

Mark Zuckerberg - Llama 3, Open Sourcing $10b Models, & Caesar Augustus

Apr 18th, 2024 1h 17m

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 moreEnjoy!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podca

Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken - How to Build & Understand GPT-7's Mind

Mar 28th, 2024 3h 12m

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

Demis Hassabis - Scaling, Superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, Rogue Nations Threat

Feb 28th, 2024 1h 1m

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

Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) - Craft, Beauty, & The Future of Payments

Feb 21st, 2024 1h 54m

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 g

Tyler Cowen - Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, Animal Spirits, Anarchy, & Growth

Jan 31st, 2024 1h 42m

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 econ

Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro [Narration]

Jan 23rd, 2024 36m 32s

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-johnsonListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me

Will scaling work? [Narration]

Jan 19th, 2024 25m 43s

This is a narration of my blog post, Will scaling work?. You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-workListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future

Jung Chang - Living through Cultural Revolution and the Crimes of Mao

Nov 29th, 2023 1h 31m

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 daught

Andrew Roberts - SV's Napoleon Cult, Why Hitler Lost WW2, Churchill as Applied Historian

Nov 22nd, 2023 1h 18m

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 asp

Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance

Nov 15th, 2023 2h 34m

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

Paul Christiano - Preventing an AI Takeover

Oct 31st, 2023 3h 7m

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),-

Shane Legg (DeepMind Founder) - 2028 AGI, New Architectures, Aligning Superhuman Models

Oct 26th, 2023 44m 19s

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

Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) - Past, Present, & Future of Mathematics

Oct 12th, 2023 1h 31m

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

Sarah C. M. Paine - WW2, Taiwan, Ukraine, & Maritime vs Continental Powers

Oct 4th, 2023 2h 24m

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

George Hotz vs Eliezer Yudkowsky AI Safety Debate

Aug 17th, 2023 1h 28m

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 v

Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) - Scaling, Alignment, & AI Progress

Aug 8th, 2023 1h 58m

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.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spo

Andy Matuschak - Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, & Why Books Don’t Work

Jul 12th, 2023 2h 22m

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 recor

Carl Shulman (Pt 2) - AI Takeover, Bio & Cyber Attacks, Detecting Deception, & Humanity's Far Future

Jun 26th, 2023 3h 7m

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

Carl Shulman (Pt 1) - Intelligence Explosion, Primate Evolution, Robot Doublings, & Alignment

Jun 14th, 2023 2h 44m

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

Richard Rhodes - Making of Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2, Oppenheimer, & Abolishing Nukes

May 23rd, 2023 2h 37m

It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic BombWe discuss- similarities between AI progress & Manhattan Project (developing a powerful, unprecedented, & potentiall

Eliezer Yudkowsky - Why AI Will Kill Us, Aligning LLMs, Nature of Intelligence, SciFi, & Rationality

Apr 6th, 2023 4h 3m

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

Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) - Building AGI, Alignment, Future Models, Spies, Microsoft, Taiwan, & Enlightenment

Mar 27th, 2023 47m 41s

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

Nat Friedman - Reading Ancient Scrolls, Open Source, & AI

Mar 22nd, 2023 1h 38m

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 Herculaneu