
Dwarkesh Podcast
Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com
Show episodes

Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih
On this episode, I chat with Victor Shih about all things China. We discuss China’s massive local debt crisis, the CCP’s views on AI, what happens after Xi, and more. Victor Shih is an expert on the Chinese political system, as well as their banking and fiscal policies, and he has amassed more biographical data on the
New episode with my good friends Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken. Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton researches mechanistic interpretability, both at Anthropic. We talk through what’s changed in the last year of AI research; the new RL regime and how far it can scale; how to trace a model’s thoughts; and how cou
Based on my essay about AI firms. Huge thanks to Petr and his team for bringing this to life! Watch on YouTube. Thanks to Google for sponsoring. We used their Veo 2 model to make this entire video—it generated everything from the photorealistic humans to the claymation octopuses. If you’re a Gemini Advanced user, you c
Zuck on: * Llama 4, benchmark gaming * Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI * DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump * Orion glasses, AI relationships, and preventing reward-hacking from our tech. Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. ---------- SPONSORS * Scale is building the infrastruc
Why Rome Actually Fell: Plagues, Slavery, & Ice Age — Kyle Harper
800 years before the Black Death, the very same bacteria ravaged Rome, killing 60%+ of the population in many areas. Also, back-to-back volcanic eruptions caused a mini Ice Age, leaving Rome devastated by famine and disease. I chatted with historian Kyle Harper about this and much else: * Rome as a massive slave societ
Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an intelligence explosion is plausible, but are convinced we'll see explosive economic growth (economy literally doubling every year or two). This discussion offers a totally different scenario than my recent i