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Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence

Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain

30 Dec 2025 31 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Dwarkesh PatelAdam Marblestone

Claim mix

belief 12evaluation 10uncertainty 6commitment 2preference 1

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Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

31 published records

01 / evaluation

In general, maybe there’s this principle that digital minds which can be copied, have different tradeoffs which are relevant, from biological minds which cannot. So in general, it should make sense to amortize more things because you can literally copy the amortization, or copy the things that you have sort of built in.

“In general, maybe there’s this principle that digital minds which can be copied, have different tradeoffs which are relevant, from biological minds which cannot. So in general, it should make sense to amortize more things because you can literally copy the amortization, or copy the things that you have sort of built in.”
Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

03 / evaluation

The cortex inherently has the ability to generalize because it’s just predicting based on these very abstract variables and all these integrated information that it has.

“The cortex inherently has the ability to generalize because it’s just predicting based on these very abstract variables and all these integrated information that it has.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

04 / uncertainty

We don’t know how they’re all connected and exactly what they do or what the circuits are or what they mean, but you can just quantify how many different kinds of cells there are with sequencing the RNA.

“We don’t know how they’re all connected and exactly what they do or what the circuits are or what they mean, but you can just quantify how many different kinds of cells there are with sequencing the RNA.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

05 / belief

First of all, I think the probabilistic AI people would be like, of course you need test-time compute, because this inference problem is really hard and the only ways we know how to do it involve lots of test-time compute.

“First of all, I think the probabilistic AI people would be like, of course you need test-time compute, because this inference problem is really hard and the only ways we know how to do it involve lots of test-time compute.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

09 / belief

What I think we should do is we should describe the brain more in that language of things like architectures, learning rules, initializations, rather than trying to find the Golden Gate Bridge circuit and saying exactly how this neuron actually… That’s going to be some incredibly complicated learned pattern.

“What I think we should do is we should describe the brain more in that language of things like architectures, learning rules, initializations, rather than trying to find the Golden Gate Bridge circuit and saying exactly how this neuron actually… That’s going to be some incredibly complicated learned pattern.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

11 / belief

I think you either have to have special cell types or you have to somehow otherwise get special wiring rules that evolution can say this neuron needs to wire to this neuron, without any learning. And the way that that is most likely to happen, I think, is that those cells express different receptors and proteins that say, “Okay, when this one comes in contact with this one, let’s form a synapse.

“I think you either have to have special cell types or you have to somehow otherwise get special wiring rules that evolution can say this neuron needs to wire to this neuron, without any learning. And the way that that is most likely to happen, I think, is that those cells express different receptors and proteins that say, “Okay, when this one comes in contact with this one, let’s form a synapse.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

15 / belief

Maybe he meant this, but I think another interpretation of actually what’s happening there is that these social reward functions that are built into the Steering Subsystem needed to make use more of being able to see your elders and see what the visual cues are and hear what they’re saying.

“Maybe he meant this, but I think another interpretation of actually what’s happening there is that these social reward functions that are built into the Steering Subsystem needed to make use more of being able to see your elders and see what the visual cues are and hear what they’re saying.”
Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

16 / uncertainty

I mean the message I’m taking from this interview is that like all these people that folks make fun of on Twitter, Yann LeCun and Beff Jezos and whatever, I don’t know maybe they got it right.

“I mean the message I’m taking from this interview is that like all these people that folks make fun of on Twitter, Yann LeCun and Beff Jezos and whatever, I don’t know maybe they got it right.”
Speaker
Dwarkesh Patel
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

17 / belief

There might be other ways of learning, energy-based models or other things like that, that you can imagine that is involved in being able to do this and that the brain has that. But I think there’s a version of it where what the brain does is crappy versions of backprop to learn to predict through a few layers and that it’s kind of like a multimodal foundation model.

“There might be other ways of learning, energy-based models or other things like that, that you can imagine that is involved in being able to do this and that the brain has that. But I think there’s a version of it where what the brain does is crappy versions of backprop to learn to predict through a few layers and that it’s kind of like a multimodal foundation model.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

21 / belief

I think if AlphaZero, and model-based RL and all these other things that were being worked on 10 years ago, had been giving us the GPT-5 type capabilities, then I would be like, “Oh wow, we’re both in the right paradigm and seeing the results a priori.

“I think if AlphaZero, and model-based RL and all these other things that were being worked on 10 years ago, had been giving us the GPT-5 type capabilities, then I would be like, “Oh wow, we’re both in the right paradigm and seeing the results a priori.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

22 / evaluation

, and each student pursuing a totally different direction or thesis that you see in universities is not also really key. But I think some amount of scalable infrastructure is missing in essentially every area of science, even math, which is crazy.

“, and each student pursuing a totally different direction or thesis that you see in universities is not also really key. But I think some amount of scalable infrastructure is missing in essentially every area of science, even math, which is crazy.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

23 / commitment

If I can build that Hubble Space Telescope, then I will unblock all the other researchers in my field or some path of technological progress in the way that the Hubble Space Telescope lifted the boats and improved the life of every astronomer.

“If I can build that Hubble Space Telescope, then I will unblock all the other researchers in my field or some path of technological progress in the way that the Hubble Space Telescope lifted the boats and improved the life of every astronomer.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

24 / uncertainty

I don’t know enough details of how hard these things are to search for, and I’m not sure anyone can fully predict that, just as we couldn’t exactly predict when Go would be solved or something like that.

“I don’t know enough details of how hard these things are to search for, and I’m not sure anyone can fully predict that, just as we couldn’t exactly predict when Go would be solved or something like that.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

25 / evaluation

If I channel Steve Byrnes more, I think he’s very concerned that the minimum viable things in the Steering Subsystem that you need to get something smart is way less than the minimum viable set of things you need for it to have human-like social instincts and ethics and stuff like that.

“If I channel Steve Byrnes more, I think he’s very concerned that the minimum viable things in the Steering Subsystem that you need to get something smart is way less than the minimum viable set of things you need for it to have human-like social instincts and ethics and stuff like that.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

26 / evaluation

I don’t know, but I’m not a believer in the radical, “Oh, actually memory is not synapses mostly, or learning is mostly genetic changes” or something like that.

“I don’t know, but I’m not a believer in the radical, “Oh, actually memory is not synapses mostly, or learning is mostly genetic changes” or something like that.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

29 / evaluation

I think evolution may have built a lot of complexity into the loss functions actually, many different loss functions for different areas turned on at different stages of development.

“I think evolution may have built a lot of complexity into the loss functions actually, many different loss functions for different areas turned on at different stages of development.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

30 / evaluation

If we don’t know if it’s doing a backprop-like learning, and we don’t know if it’s doing energy-based models, and we don’t know how these areas are even connected in the first place, it’s very hard to really get to the ground truth of this.

“If we don’t know if it’s doing a backprop-like learning, and we don’t know if it’s doing energy-based models, and we don’t know how these areas are even connected in the first place, it’s very hard to really get to the ground truth of this.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

31 / preference

Because if we’re going to be able to seek status in the tribe or learn from knowledgeable people, as you said, or things like that, exchange knowledge and skills with friends but not with enemies… We have to learn all this stuff.

“Because if we’re going to be able to seek status in the tribe or learn from knowledgeable people, as you said, or things like that, exchange knowledge and skills with friends but not with enemies… We have to learn all this stuff.”
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast
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