Technology

Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Patel

Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com

142 episodes

Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? 1 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 37 min 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 of…

Noam Brown – Agent swarms, alignment, & recursive self-improvement 17 Sept 2026 · 1 hr 20 min 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.…

AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement 11 Sept 2026 · 1 hr 37 min 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, because…

Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face 1 Sept 2026 · 2 hr 21 min 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 is…

The rise and fall of agent civilizations 31 Aug 2026 · 25 min 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 ac…

Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028 25 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 17 min 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; a…

Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research? 11 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 13 min 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 Models…

8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning 7 Aug 2026 · 9 min 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

Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x 3 Aug 2026 · 11 min 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 built-in…

Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity 10 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 38 min 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 taking…

Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math 30 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 34 min 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 progr…

The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job 26 Jun 2026 · 20 min 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 ad…

The data black hole at the center of AI 19 Jun 2026 · 12 min 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 sinc…

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time 16 Jun 2026 · 2 hr 8 min 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,…

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI? 4 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 16 min 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…

Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up 22 May 2026 · 1 hr 21 min 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 w…

Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch 15 May 2026 · 2 hr 37 min 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…

David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution 8 May 2026 · 2 hr 13 min 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…

Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served 29 Apr 2026 · 2 hr 14 min 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 wh…

Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat 15 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 43 min 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 N…

Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses 7 Apr 2026 · 2 hr 3 min 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. Bu…

Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery 20 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 24 min 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 fa…

Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute 13 Mar 2026 · 2 hr 31 min 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, hyp…

The most important question nobody's asking about AI 11 Mar 2026 · 25 min 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 structur…

Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer 6 Mar 2026 · 2 hr 2 min 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 Chi…

Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential" 13 Feb 2026 · 2 hr 22 min 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…

Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space” 5 Feb 2026 · 2 hr 50 min 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…

Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain 30 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 50 min 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…

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) 23 Dec 2025 · 12 min 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 00:…

Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War 19 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 55 min 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…