Dwarkesh Podcast

159 - What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses

158 - What will computer chips look like in 2045?

157 - Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?

156 - Noam Brown – Agent swarms, alignment, & recursive self-improvement

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

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

153 - The rise and fall of agent civilizations

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

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

150 - 8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning

149 - Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x

148 - Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity

147 - Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math

146 - The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job

145 - The data black hole at the center of AI

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

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

142 - Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

141 - Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

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

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

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

137 - Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses

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

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

134 - The most important question nobody's asking about AI

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

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

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

130 - Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain

129 - Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

128 - Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War

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

126 - Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI

125 - Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

124 - Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

123 - Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

122 - Some thoughts on the Sutton interview

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

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

119 - How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

118 - Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel

117 - China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer

116 - Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

115 - Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China

114 - Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history

113 - Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner

112 - A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church

111 - Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber

110 - "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff

109 - Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih

108 - Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken

107 - What will automated firms look like?

106 - Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 months

105 - Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper

104 - AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu

103 - AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo

102 - AMA: career advice given AGI, how I research ft. Sholto & Trenton

101 - Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution

100 - Notes on China

99 - Satya Nadella — Microsoft’s AGI plan & quantum breakthrough

98 - Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer — 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI

97 - Sarah Paine — How Mao conquered China (lecture & interview)

96 - Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)

95 - Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview)

94 - Tyler Cowen — The #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans

92 - Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT

91 - Gwern — Anonymous writer who predicted AI trajectory on $12K/year salary

90 - @Asianometry & Dylan Patel — How the semiconductor industry actually works

89 - Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin

88 - David Reich — How one small tribe conquered the world 70,000 years ago

87 - Joe Carlsmith — Preventing an AI takeover

86 - Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan

85 - Tony Blair — Why political leaders keep failing at major change

84 - Francois Chollet — Why the biggest AI models can't solve simple puzzles

83 - Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history

82 - John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) — Reasoning, RLHF, & plan for 2027 AGI

81 - Mark Zuckerberg — Llama 3, $10B models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW datacenters

80 - Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken — How LLMs actually think

79 - Demis Hassabis — Scaling, superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, AlphaFold

78 - Patrick Collison — Why Silicon Valley's most talented should leave

77 - Tyler Cowen — Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, animal spirits, anarchy, & growth

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

75 - Will scaling work? [Narration]

74 - Jung Chang (Wild Swans author) — Living through history's largest man-made famine

73 - Andrew Roberts — Why Hitler lost WWII, Churchill as applied historian, & Napoleon as startup founder

72 - Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance

71 - Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover

70 - Shane Legg (DeepMind Founder) — 2028 AGI, superhuman alignment, new architectures

69 - Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) — Past, present, & future of mathematics

68 - Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake

67 - Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty

66 - Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) — The hidden pattern behind every AI breakthrough

65 - Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail

64 - Carl Shulman (Pt 2) — AI Takeover, bio & cyber attacks, detecting deception, & humanity's far future

63 - Carl Shulman (Pt 1) — Intelligence explosion, primate evolution, robot doublings, & alignment

62 - Richard Rhodes — The making of the atomic bomb

61 - Eliezer Yudkowsky — Why AI will kill us, aligning LLMs, nature of intelligence, SciFi, & rationality

60 - Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) — Why next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence