Dwarkesh Podcast

May 22, 2026 1h 20m

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...

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May 15, 2026 2h 37m

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...

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May 8, 2026 2h 13m

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 sele...

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Apr 29, 2026 2h 13m

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 y...

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Apr 7, 2026 2h 3m

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 sc...

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Mar 20, 2026 1h 23m

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 w...

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Mar 13, 2026 2h 30m

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 ...

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Mar 11, 2026 24m

The most important question nobody's asking about AI

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 (...

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Mar 6, 2026 2h 2m

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...

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Feb 13, 2026 2h 22m

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 discu...

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Feb 5, 2026 2h 49m

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 Eart...

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Dec 30, 2025 1h 49m

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 t...

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Dec 23, 2025 12m

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

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 shi...

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Dec 19, 2025 1h 54m

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 ...

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Nov 25, 2025 1h 36m

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 Yo...

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Nov 12, 2025 1h 27m

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI

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....

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Oct 31, 2025 1h 30m

Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for over a ce...

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Oct 17, 2025 2h 25m

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

The Andrej Karpathy episode. During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will ...

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Oct 10, 2025 1h 20m

Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

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...

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Oct 4, 2025 11m

Some thoughts on the Sutton interview

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 th...

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Sep 26, 2025 1h 6m

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

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. ...

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Sep 12, 2025 1h 28m

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

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”...

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Sep 5, 2025 1h 35m

How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII...

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Aug 21, 2025 1h 44m

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

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 optimiz...

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Aug 15, 2025 1h 8m

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

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 ...

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Aug 7, 2025 1h 8m

Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

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 f...

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Jul 25, 2025 1h 55m

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

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 immed...

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Jul 10, 2025 2h 12m

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

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 v...

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Jul 3, 2025 14m

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

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 ver...

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All Episodes

Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

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

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

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

Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses

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

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

The most important question nobody's asking about AI

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

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

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

Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War

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

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI

Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

Some thoughts on the Sutton interview

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

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

How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

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

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

Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

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

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

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

Skim the episode first,
then decide if it is worth listening.

Dwarkesh Podcast

All Episodes

Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

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

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

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

Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses

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

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

The most important question nobody's asking about AI

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

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

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

Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War

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

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI

Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

Some thoughts on the Sutton interview

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

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

How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

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

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

Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

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

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

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

Skim the episode first,then decide if it is worth listening.

Skim the episode first,
then decide if it is worth listening.