Dwarkesh Podcast

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

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 to tax and redistribute…

Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

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 way they do.Reiner is…

Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

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 cleanest worked example of…

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

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 dormant in our species since…

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

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

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

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 what the labs are doing…

Unlock The Future - Intro

Welcome to Darkness Podcast, the show where we dive into the world of technology shaping our lives today and tomorrow. From artificial intelligence transforming industries, to breakthroughs in space…

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

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 Nvidia doesn’t just…

Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses

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.But it's also a…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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*…