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The data black hole at the center of AI
This episode features Dwarkesh Patel delivering a solo monologue — drawn from his written blog post — exploring one of the most underappreciated constraints in modern AI development: sample efficiency…
Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
Eric Zhang, former VP of AI at 1X Technologies and senior research scientist at Google DeepMind Robotics, rebuilt AlphaGo from scratch during his sabbatical. Zhang achieved comparable performance to t…
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
David Reich, professor of ancient DNA at Harvard, discusses groundbreaking findings from his lab's analysis of over 16,000 ancient human genomes spanning 18,000 years across Europe and the Middle East…
Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served
This episode features Reiner Pope, CEO of Maddox and former Google TPU architect, delivering a blackboard lecture on ML infrastructure and model architecture. The conversation provides a technical dee…
Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat
Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of NVIDIA, discusses the company's position in the AI revolution and its broader accelerated computing mission. The conversation covers NVIDIA's business philosophy, supp…
Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses
This conversation features Michael Nielsen, a quantum computing pioneer who wrote the definitive textbook in the field, co-founded the open science movement, and is currently a research fellow at the …
Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
Terence Tao, one of the world's leading mathematicians, discusses the intersection of artificial intelligence and mathematical research with the host. The conversation begins with Kepler's discovery o…
Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute
Dylan Patel, CEO of SemiAnalysis, discusses the trillion-dollar semiconductor supply chain powering AI infrastructure. The conversation covers how big tech's $600 billion combined CapEx from Amazon, M…
I’m glad the Anthropic fight is happening now
This analysis examines the conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War, where the government declared the AI company a supply chain risk after Anthropic refused to remove restrictions on mass…
How cosplaying Ancient Rome led to the scientific revolution
Ada Palmer, Renaissance historian, novelist, and composer at the University of Chicago, discusses her book Inventing the Renaissance, which examines how 14th-century humanists deliberately created the…
Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, discusses AI progress three years after his previous interview. He maintains his 2017 'Big Blob of Compute Hypothesis' that raw compute, data quality, an…
Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
This wide-ranging conversation features Elon Musk discussing his vision for space-based AI infrastructure, humanoid robotics, semiconductor manufacturing, and government efficiency. Musk leads Tesla, …
An audio version of my blog post, Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)
This essay explores the fundamental tension between short AI timelines and current reinforcement learning approaches. The author argues that if we're truly close to human-like learners, then the massi…
Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), discusses the current state and future of AI development. Sutskever previously co-founded OpenAI and was instrumental in…
Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's EVP of Cloud and AI, are interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, during a tour of Microsoft's new Fairwater 2 data cente…
David Reich — How one small tribe conquered the world 70,000 years ago
The episode features David Reich, a geneticist of ancient DNA at Harvard whose work has transformed our understanding of human history and evolution through genomic analysis of both modern and archaic…
Sarah Paine – How Russia sabotaged China's rise
Sarah Paine, a naval historian and expert on Russo-Chinese relations, delivers a comprehensive analysis of the complex relationship between Russia and China from the mid-19th century to present day. H…
Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber
The episode features Arthur Kroeber, founder of Gavekal Dragonomics and author of China's Economy What Everyone Needs to Know, discussing China's economic model, industrial policy, and relationship wi…
Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
The episode features Richard Sutton, Turing Award winner and founding father of reinforcement learning, who invented fundamental techniques like TD learning and policy gradient methods. Sutton challen…
“I find it almost disturbing that the universe favors life this strongly” – Nick Lane
The episode features Nick Lane, an evolutionary biochemist at University College London, whose books and papers reconceptualize life's 4 billion year history through the lens of energy flow and bioene…
Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”
The episode features Andrej Karpathy, former director of AI at Tesla and co-founder of OpenAI, now building Eureka Labs to revolutionize technical education. Karpathy discusses why achieving functiona…
Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
This conversation features Andre Karpathy, former Director of AI at Tesla and co-founder of OpenAI, now building Eureka Labs to revolutionize technical education. Karpathy brings 15 years of AI resear…
Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable
Nick Lane is an evolutionary biochemist at University College London whose research reconceptualizes life's 4 billion-year history through the lens of energy flow. His work spans from the origin of li…
Some thoughts on the Sutton interview
The speaker reflects on Richard Sutton's worldview following a previous interview, attempting to steel-man Sutton's position on AI learning paradigms. Sutton is the author of The Bitter Lesson, a infl…
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