Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

More from Dwarkesh Podcast

1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   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,…

6. 

   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…

7. 

   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…

8. 

   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…

9. 

   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

10. 

    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…

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