Dwarkesh Patel — transcripts.

1Dylan Patel – Two labs will soon control most of the world's workforceOkay, I’m back with Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis. Our version of a family Thanksgiving dinner is a regular yearly podcast. But we're not actually related. Don’t tell the… 2Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) — Why next-token prediction could surpass human intelligenceToday I have the pleasure of interviewing Ilya Sutskever, who is the Co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI. Ilya, welcome to The Lunar Society. Thank you, happy to be here.… 3Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing ChinaI'm going to talk to you today about one of the two great generations in modern Japanese history. They are the Meiji generation, named after the Meiji Emperor here. That… 4Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolutionToday, I have the pleasure of chatting with Joseph Henrich, who is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and an author of two of my favorite books, The… 5Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) – AI disproved a famous math conjecture. Now what?Today, I'm chatting with Grant Sanderson, who runs 3Blue1Brown and is now working on a new project documenting the progress AI is making in math. I wanted to talk to you about… 6Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead endToday I'm chatting with Richard Sutton, who is one of the founding fathers of reinforcement learning and inventor of many of the main techniques used there, like TD learning and… 7What does the next training paradigm look like?So here's a big research bet that all the labs are making. They think that if we train AIs to accomplish millions of verifiable tasks across thousands of diverse RL environments… 8“I find it almost disturbing that the universe favors life this strongly” – Nick Lane 9How GPT, Claude, and Gemini are actually trained and served – Reiner PopeToday, I'm interviewing Reiner Pope, who is the CEO of MatX, which is a new chip startup. Previously, he was doing TPU architecture and many other things at Google. This is a very… 10Some thoughts on the Sutton interviewBoy do you guys have a lot of thoughts about the Sutton interview. I’ve been thinking about it myself and I think I have a much better understanding now of Sutton’s perspective… 11David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farmingHumans, at least in this part of the world, were wrenched into a way of living that was so different from how their hunter-gatherer ancestors lived that the organism had to adapt… 12Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 monthsMark, thanks for coming on the podcast again. Yeah, happy to do it. Good to see you. You too. Last time you were here, you had launched Llama 3. Now you've launched Llama 4. Well… 13Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur KroeberToday I'm interviewing Arthur Kroeber, the founder of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research consultancy focused on China, and the author of China’s Economy. What Everyone Needs to Know.… 14A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George ChurchToday I have the pleasure of interviewing George Church. I don't know how to introduce you. This is not even an exaggeration, it would honestly be easier to list out the major… 15Chip design from the bottom up – Reiner PopeI'm back with Reiner Pope, CEO of MatX, a new AI chip company. Last time we were talking about what happens inside a data center. Now I want to understand what happens inside an… 16Why I don’t think AGI is right around the cornerI’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out our timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away. Others 2 years. Here’s where my thoughts lie as of July… 17Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential”We talked three years ago. In your view, what has been the biggest update over the last three years? What has been the biggest difference between what it felt like then versus… 18Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than usToday, I'm speaking with Michael Nielsen. You have done many things. You're one of the pioneers of quantum computing, wrote the main textbook in the field of the open science… 19Dylan Patel — The single biggest bottleneck to scaling AI computeAll right, this is the episode where my roommate teaches me semiconductors. It's also the send off for this current set. It is. After you use it, I'm like, "I can't use this… 20Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”Today I'm speaking with Andrej Karpathy. Andrej, why do you say that this will be the decade of agents and not the year of agents? First of all, thank you for having me here. I'm… 21Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis BollardToday I'm chatting with Lewis Bollard, who is Farm Animal Welfare program director at Open Philanthropy. Open Philanthropy is the biggest charity in this animal welfare space.… 22Satya Nadella shows me the first Majorana 1 Quantum Computing chipI believe this is it right here that is it yeah yes I mean to think of the the fact that we were able to build a million uh Cubit quantum computer in a thing of this size is just… 23AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel KokotajloToday I have the great pleasure of chatting with Scott Alexander and Daniel Kokotajlo. Scott is of course the author of the blog Slate Star Codex, Astral Codex 10 now. It’s… 24What will automated firms look like?When people think of AGI, they imagine what it would be like to have a personal assistant who answers all their questions and works 24/7. But that just underestimates the real… 25Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor ShihToday I'm talking with Victor Shih, who is the director of the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego. China is obviously one of the most important economic and geopolitical… 26Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of researchYou know what's crazy? That all of this is real. Meaning what? Don't you think so? All this AI stuff and all this Bay Area… that it's happening. Isn't it straight out of science… 27What are we scaling?I'm confused why some people have super short timelines yet at the same time are bullish on scaling up reinforcement learning a top LLMs. If we're actually close to a humanlike… 28Adam Marblestone – AI is missing something fundamental about the brainThe big million-dollar question that I have, that I've been trying to get the answer to through all these interviews with AI researchers: How does the brain do it? We're throwing… 29Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in historyMy guest today is Stephen Kotkin, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of two-thirds of his three-volume Stalin biographies. The first one, Stalin… 30What rebuilding AlphaGo teaches us about self-play, RL, and future of LLMs - Eric JangToday, I'm here with Eric Jang, who was most recently vice president of AI at 1X Technologies, and before that, senior research scientist at what is now Google DeepMind Robotics.… 31AMA: career advice given AGI, how I research ft. Sholto & TrentonToday, this is going to be an Ask Me Anything episode. I'm joined by my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. You guys do some AI stuff, right? Yeah. We dabble. They're… 32Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob KimmelYou always have to start by asking yourself, did evolution spend a lot of time optimizing this? If yes, my job is going to be insanely hard. If no, potentially there are some… 33AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay BesirogluToday, I'm chatting with Tamay Besiroglu and Ege Erdil. They were previously running Epoch AI and are now launching Mechanize, which is a company dedicated to automating all work.… 34Notes on ChinaLast week, I spent two weeks in China. I visited Beijing, Chengdu, Emeishan, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. I went because, look, the big thing I tried to figure out on this… 35Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada PalmerOkay, I'm back with Ada Palmer, who is a science fiction author, composer, and historian at the University of Chicago. Today, I want to talk to you about Machiavelli. He writes… 36Sarah Paine – How Hitler almost starved BritainIt turns out that the possibilities for maritime and continental powers are a little different. Basically, a small subset of countries can defend themselves primarily at sea. That… 37Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's risePeople are worried about whether there's going to be an enduring relationship with China and Russia. If you look at this picture, the relations look more glacial than cordial and… 38Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle HarperToday, I have the pleasure of chatting with Kyle Harper, who is a professor and provost emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, and the author of some really interesting books… 39Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AIToday, I'm chatting with Terence Tao, who needs no introduction. Terence, I want to begin by having you retell the story of how Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion… 40Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada PalmerToday I'm chatting with Ada Palmer, who's a Renaissance historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago. Today we're discussing your book, Inventing the… 41"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken RogoffToday I’m speaking with Ken Rogoff, who is a professor at Harvard, recent author of Our Dollar, Your Problem, and former Chief Economist at the IMF. Ken, thanks so much for coming… 42Sarah Paine - Why Putin and Xi can't escape geographyGood evening. It's such a pleasure to be with you. I'm going to make an argument today about how the world is organized or at least how different types of empires back in the day… 43The most important question nobody's asking about AI.So, by now I'm sure that you've heard that the Department of War has declared Enthropic a supply chain risk because Enthropic refused to remove red lines around the use of their… 44The better AI gets, the smaller its share of the economy might get – Alex Imas and Phil TrammellToday I'm chatting with Alex Imas, who is Director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind and Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, and Phil Trammell, who is Head of… 45Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?We've seen the valuations of a bunch of software companies crash because people are expecting AI to commoditize software. There's a potentially naive way of thinking about things… 46Sarah Paine – Why Russia Lost the Cold WarThank you for coming. It's a treat to be with you and sharing all this stuff. Since we seem to be in a second Cold War, maybe it's a good time to revisit the last one to see why… 47Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”Are there really three hours of questions? Are you fucking serious? You don't think there's a lot to talk about, Elon? Holy fuck man. It's the most interesting point. All the… 48Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIToday we are interviewing Satya Nadella. "We" being me and Dylan Patel, who is founder of SemiAnalysis. Satya, welcome. Thank you. It's great. Thanks for coming over to Atlanta.… 49Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton BrickenOkay. I'm joined again by my friends, Sholto Bricken... Wait Did I do this last time? You did the same thing. No, no, you named us differently, but we didn't have Sholto Bricken… 50The data black hole at the center of AISo one definition of intelligence is sample efficiency. That is to say, how much data do you need in a given domain to operate fluently and competently? And it's actually not… 51Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey LevineToday I'm chatting with Sergey Levine, who is a co-founder of Physical Intelligence, which is a robotics foundation model company, and also a professor at UC Berkeley and just… 52China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey HandmerToday I'm interviewing Casey Handmer. Casey has worked on a bunch of cool things. Caltech PhD on some gravitational wave black hole gimmick stuff, then Hyperloop, then the Jet…