Dwarkesh Podcast

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 progress in other fields will look like. Even within mathematics, there’s a jagged landscape. What does it look like?What is the nature of the most important conceptual breakthroughs in the history of mathematics, and how...

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 address, and when they send an invoice, Mercury automatically creates a draft payment for me to review. I no longer have to hunt through my inbox for invoices or deal with messy spreadsheets to track my bills. Mercury...

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 since I use Mercury to run basically my entire business, Command has access to all the info it needs to get real work done. I can ask it to send invoices, or categorize expenses, or even transfer money… and Command just...

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, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence.In 1513 the Medici retook control of...

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 the wealth that will be generated? How should countries not in the AI supply chain index into the gains? Is there any world where inequality doesn’t explode?It might seem like these questions have...

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 CEO of MatX, a new chip startup (full disclosure - I’m an angel investor). He was previously at Google, where he worked on software efficiency, compilers, and TPU architecture.Watch this one on...

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 the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play. You have to go back to 2017 to get insight into how the more general AIs of the future might learn.Once he explained how...

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 the agricultural revolution.By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up.Selection went especially bonkers during the...

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 from a handful of equations, public API prices, and some chalk.It’s a bit technical, but I encourage you to hang in there – it’s really worth it.There are less than a handful of people who understand...

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 become a hyperscaler, how it makes its investments, and much more. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Crusoe’s cloud runs on state-of-the-art Blackwell GPUs, with Vera Rubin...