Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com
Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Nov 13, 2026 · 44:26
If you asked me earlier this year how far away we are from superintelligence, I’d probably have said at least the better part of a decade. But over the last three months, from…
Oct 30, 2026 · 1:01:10
The Robert Caro interview. Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Antithesis lets you run thorough simulation tests on every PR your coding agents ship. That’s…
Oct 29, 2026 · 24:42
I recently got to interview Robert Caro, who is my favorite author of all time. This gave me the excuse to reread his biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, and to…
Oct 22, 2026 · 1:09:00
I spent two days touring Intel’s most advanced fab and talking to its technical leadership to understand what the chips of the future will look like. A lot of what's coming next…
Oct 1, 2026 · 1:37:23
New episode with military historian Si Sheppard . The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history. Hernan Cortés and some hundreds…
Sep 17, 2026 · 1:20:10
New episode with Noam Brown. We talk about multi-agent, Navier-Stokes, and what the current explosion of maths progress tells us about what happens once you automate AI research.…
Sep 11, 2026 · 1:37:01
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,…
Sep 1, 2026 · 2:20:33
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…
Aug 31, 2026 · 24:40
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…
Aug 25, 2026 · 1:16:53
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;…
Aug 11, 2026 · 2:12:32
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…
Aug 7, 2026 · 8:37
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
Aug 3, 2026 · 11:18
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…
Jul 10, 2026 · 1:38:24
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…
Jun 30, 2026 · 1:33:39
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…
Jun 26, 2026 · 19:53
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…
Jun 19, 2026 · 11:57
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…
Jun 16, 2026 · 2:08:20
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,…
Jun 4, 2026 · 1:16:08
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…
May 22, 2026 · 1:20:30
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…
May 15, 2026 · 2:37:29
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…
May 8, 2026 · 2:13:20
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…
Apr 29, 2026 · 2:13:50
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…
Apr 15, 2026 · 1:43:12
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…
Apr 7, 2026 · 2:03:03
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.…
Mar 20, 2026 · 1:23:44
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…
Mar 13, 2026 · 2:30:44
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,…
Mar 11, 2026 · 24:38
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…
Mar 6, 2026 · 2:02:19
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…
Feb 13, 2026 · 2:22:20
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…
Feb 5, 2026 · 2:49:45
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…
Dec 30, 2025 · 1:49:53
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…
Dec 23, 2025 · 12:28
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…
Dec 19, 2025 · 1:54:55
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…
Nov 25, 2025 · 1:36:03
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…
Nov 12, 2025 · 1:27:47
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…
Oct 31, 2025 · 1:30:36
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…
Oct 17, 2025 · 2:25:19
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…
Oct 10, 2025 · 1:20:08
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…
Oct 4, 2025 · 11:39
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) -…
Sep 26, 2025 · 1:06:22
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…
Sep 12, 2025 · 1:28:28
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…
Sep 5, 2025 · 1:35:17
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…
Aug 21, 2025 · 1:44:40
Jacob Kimmel thinks he can find the transcription factors to reverse aging. We do a deep dive on why this might be plausible and why evolution hasn’t optimized for longevity. We…
Aug 15, 2025 · 1:08:22
How will we feed the 100s of GWs of extra energy demand that AI will create over the coming decade? On this episode, Casey Handmer (Caltech PhD, former NASA JPL, founder & CEO of…
Aug 7, 2025 · 1:08:05
A deep dive with Lewis Bollard, who leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farmed Animal Welfare , on the surprising economics of the meat industry. Why is factory farming so…
Jul 25, 2025 · 1:55:37
After my last lecture series with Sarah Paine ended, I still had so many questions . I knew we’d only scratched the surface of Sarah’s scholarship, so I immediately invited her…
Jul 10, 2025 · 2:12:41
The Stephen Kotkin episode. Kotkin is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Joseph Stalin and has written a massive 2-volume biography on him (with a 3rd volume in the works).…
Jul 3, 2025 · 14:01
I’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away - others 2 years . Here’s an audio version of where my…
Jun 26, 2025 · 1:33:45
George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades. Professor Church thinks…
Jun 19, 2025 · 2:26:43
Arthur Kroeber is a leading researcher on Chinese tech and macro, a founding partner at Gavekal Dragonomics , and author of "China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know." It's…
Jun 12, 2025 · 1:36:04
Ken Rogoff is the former chief economist of the IMF, a professor of Economics at Harvard, and author of the newly released Our Dollar, Your Problem and This Time is Different .…
May 29, 2025 · 1:29:09
On this episode, I chat with Victor Shih about all things China. We discuss China’s massive local debt crisis, the CCP’s views on AI, what happens after Xi, and more. Victor Shih…
May 22, 2025 · 2:24:01
New episode with my good friends Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken . Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton researches mechanistic interpretability, both at Anthropic. We talk…
May 1, 2025 · 10:18
Based on my essay about AI firms. Huge thanks to Petr and his team for bringing this to life! Watch on YouTube . Thanks to Google for sponsoring. We used their Veo 2 model to…
Apr 29, 2025 · 1:15:03
Zuck on: * Llama 4, benchmark gaming * Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI * DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump * Orion glasses, AI relationships, and…
Apr 24, 2025 · 1:23:28
800 years before the Black Death, the very same bacteria ravaged Rome, killing 60%+ of the population in many areas. Also, back-to-back volcanic eruptions caused a mini Ice Age,…
Apr 17, 2025 · 3:08:28
Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an intelligence explosion is plausible, but are convinced we'll see…
Apr 3, 2025 · 3:04:26
Scott and Daniel break down every month from now until the 2027 intelligence explosion. Scott Alexander is author of the highly influential blogs Slate Star Codex and Astral…
Mar 25, 2025 · 49:33
I recorded an AMA! I had a blast chatting with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. We discussed my new book, career advice given AGI, how I pick guests, how I research…
Mar 12, 2025 · 1:52:59
Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence. Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years. I’ve always…
Mar 5, 2025 · 19:31
I’m so excited with how this visualization of Notes on China turned out. Petr , thank you for such beautiful watercolor artwork. More to come! Watch on YouTube . ----------…
Feb 19, 2025 · 1:16:10
Satya Nadella on: Why he doesn’t believe in AGI but does believe in 10% economic growth; Microsoft’s new topological qubit breakthrough and gaming world models; Whether Office…
Feb 12, 2025 · 2:14:43
This week I welcome on the show two of the most important technologists ever, in any field. Jeff Dean is Google's Chief Scientist, and through 25 years at the company, has worked…
Jan 30, 2025 · 1:48:14
Third and final episode in the Paine trilogy! Chinese history is full of warlords constantly challenging the capital. How could Mao not only stay in power for decades, but not…
Jan 23, 2025 · 2:08:13
This is the second episode in the trilogy of a lectures by Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College. In this second episode, Prof Paine dissects the ideas and economics…
Jan 16, 2025 · 2:12:58
I’m thrilled to launch a new trilogy of double episodes: a lecture series by Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College, each followed by a deep Q&A. In this first episode,…
Jan 9, 2025 · 59:45
I interviewed Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference 2024. As always, I had a blast. This is my fourth interview with him – and yet I’m always hearing new stuff. We talked about…
Dec 26, 2024 · 2:43:37
Adam Brown is a founder and lead of BlueShift with is cracking maths and reasoning at Google DeepMind and a theoretical physicist at Stanford. We discuss: destroying the light…
Nov 13, 2024 · 1:36:43
Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you've read his blog , you know he's one of the most interesting…
Oct 2, 2024 · 2:09:57
A bonanza on the semiconductor industry and hardware scaling to AGI by the end of the decade. Dylan Patel runs Semianalysis , the leading publication and research firm on AI…
Sep 18, 2024 · 1:27:37
Unless you understand the history of oil, you cannot understand the rise of America, WW1, WW2, secular stagnation, the Middle East, Ukraine, how Xi and Putin think, and basically…
Aug 29, 2024 · 1:56:06
I had no idea how wild human history was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich . Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring…
Aug 22, 2024 · 2:30:35
Chatted with Joe Carlsmith about whether we can trust power/techno-capital, how to not end up like Stalin in our urge to control the future, gentleness towards the artificial…
Jul 24, 2024 · 2:01:34
I talked with Patrick McKenzie (known online as patio11) about how a small team he ran over a Discord server got vaccines into Americans' arms: A story of broken incentives,…
Jun 26, 2024 · 52:52
I chatted with Tony Blair about: - What he learned from Lee Kuan Yew - Intelligence agencies track record on Iraq & Ukraine - What he tells the dozens of world leaders who come…
Jun 11, 2024 · 1:33:53
Here is my conversation with Francois Chollet and Mike Knoop on the $1 million ARC-AGI Prize they're launching today . I did a bunch of socratic grilling throughout, but…
Jun 4, 2024 · 4:31:18
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…
May 15, 2024 · 1:35:26
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…
Apr 18, 2024 · 1:17:54
Mark Zuckerberg on: - Llama 3 - open sourcing towards AGI - custom silicon, synthetic data, & energy constraints on scaling - Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons,…
Mar 28, 2024 · 3:12:21
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…
Feb 28, 2024 · 1:01:34
Here is my episode with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind We discuss: * Why scaling is an artform * Adding search, planning, & AlphaZero type training atop LLMs * Making…
Feb 21, 2024 · 1:54:47
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…
Jan 31, 2024 · 1:42:22
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…
Jan 23, 2024 · 36:32
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-johnson Listen…
Jan 19, 2024 · 25:43
This is a narration of my blog post, Will scaling work? . You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-work Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or…
Nov 29, 2023 · 1:31:15
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: -…
Nov 22, 2023 · 1:18:49
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…
Nov 15, 2023 · 2:34:13
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…
Oct 31, 2023 · 3:07:01
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?…
Oct 26, 2023 · 44:19
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 *…
Oct 12, 2023 · 1:31:20
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…
Oct 4, 2023 · 2:24:33
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 &…
Aug 8, 2023 · 1:58:43
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…
Jul 12, 2023 · 2:22:40
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,…
Jun 26, 2023 · 3:07:07
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…
Jun 14, 2023 · 2:44:16
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…
May 23, 2023 · 2:37:36
It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb We discuss - similarities between AI progress &…
Apr 6, 2023 · 4:03:25
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…
Mar 27, 2023 · 47:41
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…
Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Your podcast? Get the Podli badge for your site
