Podcast · Tech & Science

Dwarkesh Podcast

by Dwarkesh Patel · English · Tech & Science

Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 38 min
Latest: 1 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

1 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 37 min

Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?

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 Conquistadors landed on a new continent they knew basically nothing about, and within 2 and a half years, conquered the 6 million strong Aztec empire. Then, a decade later, Francisco Pizarro did the same thing to an Incan Empire of some 10 million inhabitants. In both cases, the Conquistadors consistently beat native armies while being literally 100x (or even in some cases 1000x) outnumbered - and in many cases,…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

17 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

Noam Brown – Agent swarms, alignment, & recursive self-improvement

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. And we also discuss how we will know if the models are actually aligned before we kick off RSI. Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Jane Street has been interested in AI for a lot longer than you’d think, and not just for trading. In 2011, a full year before AlexNet and over a decade before ChatGPT launched, they hosted the first FOOM Debate between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson on whether AI…
11 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 37 min

AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

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 I wanted to hear the details of what's actually happening at the frontier and what comes next. Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Antithesis helps you trust your code. As agents generate more and more of your software, the bottleneck shifts from your engineers actually writing code to verifying it. Antithesis does that testing for you. Ron Minsky, who co-leads Jane Street’s tech group, told me…
1 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 21 min

Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face

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 now Coefficient Giving. She is one the three authors of METR and Redwood Research’s “ Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident ”. We go through not only what she and her coauthors discovered during this investigation, but what it means for how we should train future, smarter AIs which might be involved in the process of recursive…
31 Aug 2026 · 25 min

The rise and fall of agent civilizations

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 access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com
25 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028

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; and how Anthropic and OpenAI are on track to control most of the world’s usable FLOPs within the next few years (because they can monetize compute better and thus outbid everyone). And then we discuss whether the >$10T of total AI capex we’ll see by the end of the decade will cause a sovereign debt crisis, where hyperscaler debt raises interest rates, drives non-AI exposed countries into bankruptcy, and crashes…
11 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 13 min

Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research?

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", and is currently working on a third party investigation into the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident. In my opinion, he's one of the most interesting thinkers on the future of AI. Had him on to discuss/debate recursive self-improvement. This might be the most important question in the world right now – whether within a year or so of achieving human-level intelligence, you slingshot towards having 10s of billions of…
7 Aug 2026 · 9 min

8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning

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
3 Aug 2026 · 11 min

Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x

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 AI, Command, helps me close my books and saves me a bunch of time. At the end of each month, Command categorizes my transactions and provides its rationale for every choice: I just review, fix anything that’s off, and approve... and then Mercury syncs everything to QuickBooks. Get started at mercury.com/command This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus…
10 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 38 min

Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity

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 the 20-lecture graduate course Adam taught on it at Stanford. But in this episode, Adam distills the key idea at its heart so clearly and compellingly that even I could keep up lol. At the core of general relativity, Einstein is trying to figure out the principle behind a particular coincidence: that the mass that resists acceleration and the mass that gravity pulls on just happen to be exactly the same. Adam then…
30 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 34 min

Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math

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 different are they from what AIs are currently able to do? Does AI (on net) increase or decrease human understanding of the field? How big is the overhang from having AIs systematically try to connect…
26 Jun 2026 · 20 min

The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job

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 handles it all. Learn more at mercury.com Timestamps: (00:00:00) – The big research bet the labs are making (00:02:12) – Grindability is just as important as verifiability (00:06:10) – Will RLVR alone…
19 Jun 2026 · 12 min

The data black hole at the center of AI

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 handles it. Learn more at mercury.com/command Timestamps: (00:00:00) – What is really driving AI progress? (00:03:11) – Comparing human vs AI sample efficiency (00:08:46) – Does sample efficiency matter?…
16 Jun 2026 · 2 hr 8 min

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

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 Florence and, wrongly suspecting Machiavelli of participating in a coup attempt, fired, tortured, and exiled him. Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities…
4 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 16 min

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 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 obvious answers, but the first thing economics teaches you is that your intuitions can often be entirely wrong. It was very helpful to chat through these things with Alex and Phil. Watch on YouTube…
22 May 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

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 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 YouTube so you can see the chalkboard. Read the transcript . Sponsors * Crusoe was one of only five GPU clouds that made the gold tier in SemiAnalysis' most recent ClusterMAX report. Gold-tier…
15 May 2026 · 2 hr 37 min

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 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 AlphaGo works, it gave us the context to have a discussion about how RL works in LLMs and how it could work better – naive policy gradient RL has to figure out which of the 100k+ tokens in your…
8 May 2026 · 2 hr 13 min

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 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 Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago). That’s when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body fat to intelligence were most in flux. Over the last 10,000 years, selection pushed the…
29 Apr 2026 · 2 hr 14 min

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 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 the full stack of AI, from chip design to model architecture, as well as Reiner. It was a real delight to learn from him. Recommend watching this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard.…
15 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 43 min

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 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 deployment scheduled for later this year. But hardware is only part of the story—for inference, Crusoe’s MemoryAlloy tech implements a cluster-wide KV cache, delivering up to 10x faster TTFT and 5x…
7 Apr 2026 · 2 hr 3 min

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 surprisingly mysterious and elusive question when you look at the history of human science. We approach this question stories like Einstein (who claimed that he hadn't even heard of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which is supposed to have motivated special relativity, until after he had come up with the theory), Darwin (why did it take till 1859 to lay out an idea whose essence every farmer…
20 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 24 min

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 scientific discovery because of tight verification loops. But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia) long. During this time, what we know today as the better theory can actually make worse predictions. And the reasons it survives this epistemic hell is some mixture of judgment and heuristics that…
13 Mar 2026 · 2 hr 31 min

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, and fab equipment manufacturers. Learned a ton about every single level of the stack. Enjoy! Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Mercury has already saved me a bunch of time this tax season. Last year, I used Mercury to request W-9s from all the contractors I worked with. Then, when it came time to issue 1099s this year, I literally just clicked a button and Mercury sent them…
11 Mar 2026 · 25 min

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 (00:05:54) - AI structurally favors mass surveillance (00:08:25) - Alignment...to whom? (00:13:55) - Coordination not worth the costs 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
6 Mar 2026 · 2 hr 2 min

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 especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the Renaissance : Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices. This is because paper was still very expensive, and so you had to make this big upfront CAPEX decision to print a batch of 300 copies…
13 Feb 2026 · 2 hr 22 min

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 in the current RL regime, why task-specific RL might lead to generalization, and how AI will diffuse throughout the economy. We also dive into Anthropic’s revenue projections, compute commitments, path to profitability, and more. Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Labelbox can get you the RL tasks and environments you need. Their massive network of subject-matter experts ensures…
5 Feb 2026 · 2 hr 50 min

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 humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more. Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Mercury just started offering personal banking! I’m already banking with Mercury for business purposes, so getting to bank with them for my personal life makes everything so much simpler. Apply now at mercury.com/personal-banking * Jane Street sent me a new…
30 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 50 min

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 brain-computer interfaces to quantum computing to nanotech and even formal mathematics. In this episode, we discuss how the brain learns so much from so little, what the AI field can learn from neuroscience, and the answer to Ilya’s question: how does the genome encode abstract reward functions? Turns out, they’re all the same question. Watch on YouTube ; read the transcript . Sponsors * Gemini 3…
23 Dec 2025 · 12 min

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 shifting is justified 00:08:23 RL scaling 00:09:18 Broadly deployed intelligence explosion 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
19 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 55 min

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 into the role of the US, the Sino-Soviet border conflict, the oil bust, ethnic rebellions and even the Roman Catholic Church. As she points out, this is all particularly interesting as we find ourselves potentially at the beginning of another Cold War. As we wrap up this lecture series, I want to take a moment to thank Sarah for doing this with me. It has been such a pleasure. If you want more of…

About Dwarkesh Podcast

Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com

Dwarkesh Podcast is a English tech & science podcast from Dwarkesh Patel. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Dwarkesh Patel
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 38 min
Latest episode: 1 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1516093381
Website: dwarkesh.com/podcast
Rights: Dwarkesh Patel

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