Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory

Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive. In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed. After the episode, I convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he's up to. Please go here to contribute. Read the full transcript here. Sponsors: * Jane Street is looking to hire their next generation of leaders. Their deep learning team is looking for ML researchers, FPGA programmers, and CUDA programmers. Summer internships are open - if you want to stand out, take a crack at their new Kaggle competition. To learn more, go here: https://jane-st.co/dwarkesh * Turing provides complete post-training services for leading AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Gemini. They specialize in model evaluation, SFT, RLHF, and DPO to enhance models’ reasoning, coding, and multimodal capabilities. Learn more at turing.com/dwarkesh. * This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue. If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page. Timestamps 00:00:00 - Anonymity 00:01:09 - Automating Steve Jobs 00:04:38 - Isaac Newton's theory of progress 00:06:36 - Grand theory of intelligence 00:10:39 - Seeing scaling early 00:21:04 - AGI Timelines 00:22:54 - What to do in remaining 3 years until AGI 00:26:29 - Influencing the shoggoth with writing 00:30:50 - Human vs artificial intelligence 00:33:52 - Rabbit holes 00:38:48 - Hearing impairment 00:43:00 - Wikipedia editing 00:47:43 - Gwern.net 00:50:20 - Counterfactual careers 00:54:30 - Borges & literature 01:01:32 - Gwern's intelligence and process 01:11:03 - A day in the life of Gwern 01:19:16 - Gwern's finances 01:25:05 - The diversity of AI minds 01:27:24 - GLP drugs and obesity 01:31:08 - Drug experimentation 01:33:40 - Parasocial relationships 01:35:23 - Open rabbit holes Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe