Dwarkesh Patel
2:03:02Why Aliens Might Build a Different Tech Stack: Michael Nielsen on How Science Actually Progresses
Dwarkesh Patel opens this conversation with Michael Nielsen, a pioneer of quantum computing, co-author of the field's standard textbook, and a longtime advocate of open science, by setting aside most
1:23:43Terence Tao on Kepler, Verification, and Why AI Makes Mathematics Broader but Not Yet Deeper
In this conversation, Dwarkesh Patel asks Terence Tao how AI fits into the way science and mathematics make progress. They start with a historical case: how Kepler found the laws of planetary motion.
2:30:42Dylan Patel on Why Chips, Not Power, Will Cap AI Compute This Decade
In this long conversation, Dwarkesh Patel asks SemiAnalysis CEO Dylan Patel a series of questions about the AI compute buildout: what the hundreds of billions in hyperscaler CapEx is actually buying,
24:38Who Should AI Obey? Dwarkesh on the Anthropic–Pentagon Standoff
The Department of War has designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company refused to remove its red lines against using its models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. In this narr
2:02:19How Cosplaying Ancient Rome Led, Slowly, to Science: Ada Palmer on Renaissance Florence, Gutenberg, and Censorship
Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian, novelist, and composer at the University of Chicago and the author of Inventing the Renaissance. In this conversation with Dwarkesh Patel she lays out a long cha
2:22:00Dario Amodei: "We Are Near the End of the Exponential"
Three years after their first conversation, Dwarkesh Patel asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei what had changed most. Amodei's answer was that the technology itself had not surprised him much. Models had
1:49:28Adam Marblestone on the Brain's Hidden Advantage: Reward Functions, Not Architecture
Dwarkesh Patel opens with what he calls his "million-dollar question": LLMs are trained on far more data than any human ever sees, yet they have only a fraction of human capabilities. How does the bra
1:54:26Why Russia Lost the Cold War: Sarah Paine's Tour of the Competing Explanations
With the world possibly entering a second Cold War, historian Sarah Paine returns to the first one to ask why the Soviet Union lost it, and why participants on both sides thought it ended the way it d
1:35:39Ilya Sutskever: From the Age of Scaling Back to the Age of Research
In this conversation with host Dwarkesh, Ilya Sutskever, cofounder of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), argues that the recipe that drove AI progress for the past five years is reaching its limits. He say
1:28:17Satya Nadella on AGI, Fairwater, and Why Microsoft Won't Bet on a Single Model
Dwarkesh Patel and Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, interviewed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in Atlanta after a tour of Microsoft's new Fairwater 2 datacenter. Their central question was how a com
1:30:59How Russia Repeatedly Derailed China's Rise: Sarah Paine on a Century of Russo-Chinese Relations
Many observers worry that China and Russia are forming a lasting partnership. Military historian Sarah Paine, whose dissertation traced the Russo-Chinese border from the Opium Wars to the 1920s detach
2:25:42Andrej Karpathy on Why Agents Will Take a Decade: Ghosts, Terrible RL, and the March of Nines
In this long conversation with Dwarkesh, Andrej Karpathy explains why he thinks current AI timelines are too optimistic, even though he calls himself very bullish on the technology. He calls this "the
1:20:28Nick Lane on Why Life May Be Chemically Inevitable but Complex Life Is Rare
Evolutionary biochemist Nick Lane of University College London explains life's four-billion-year history through energy flow. In this conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, Lane lays out a chain of reasoni
11:39Rethinking the Sutton Interview: Why Imitation Learning and RL May Not Be Opposites
After a widely discussed interview with Richard Sutton, Dwarkesh returned to the conversation to lay out what they now understand Sutton's worldview to be, and where they still disagree. Their central
1:07:08Richard Sutton on Why Large Language Models Are the Wrong Starting Point for AI
Richard Sutton helped found reinforcement learning. He invented many of its core techniques, including temporal-difference (TD) learning and policy gradient methods, and he received this year's Turing
1:27:56Sergey Levine on the Robot Flywheel: Why General-Purpose Robots May Arrive Within Five Years
Sergey Levine is a co-founder of Physical Intelligence, a company building robotics foundation models, and a professor at UC Berkeley. In this conversation with podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, the centra
1:35:36Sea Power Against Continental Power: Sarah Paine on How Britain Nearly Starved and Then Prevailed, and What It Means for Russia and China
Sarah Paine, a historian who spent her career at the U.S. Naval War College, starts from a geographic premise. A small number of countries can defend themselves mainly at sea, and that opens strategic
1:44:53Evolution Never Optimized Us for Longevity: Jacob Kimmel on Reprogramming Cell Age
Jacob Kimmel is president and co-founder of NewLimit, a company trying to epigenetically reprogram cells back toward younger states. In this conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, Kimmel starts from one qu
1:07:51Casey Handmer on Energy, China, and Why He Thinks Solar Will Power the AI Build-Out
Dwarkesh Patel frames the conversation with a worry. If AI becomes an industrial race over who can build the most solar panels, batteries, GPUs, transmission lines, and transformers, that is exactly w
1:08:04Why Factory Farming Won't Simply Be Engineered Away: Lewis Bollard on Technology, Money, and Political Power
Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, which the host describes as the largest funder in the space. The conversation opens with a question many technologists would