Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
59 published records
01 / belief
“I think I was the most boring normie liberal in the world before encountering LessWrong.”
02 / belief
“I think that’s kind of why all of our policy prescriptions are things like more transparency, get more people involved, try to have lots of people working on this.”
03 / belief
“I actually argued with Daniel about this recently about one interesting case that I can go over is we have an estimate that about a year after the superintelligences start wanting robots, they’re producing a million units of robots per month. I think that’s pretty relevant because you have.”
04 / uncertainty
“Now I could never handle that schedule, I don’t know, I was in my 20s, I must have been briefly superhuman.”
05 / belief
“The thing worth noting about the future is that most of the people who will ever exist are going to be digital. And look, I think factory farming is incredibly bad.”
06 / belief
“If you can create a country of geniuses in a data center, as I think Dario Amodei put it, then you no longer have this population bottleneck, and you’re just expecting continuation of those pre-1960 trends.”
07 / belief
“Here it was a prompt, but I think very soon it’s going to be the spec where it’s more of an agent and it’s understanding the spec on a deeper level and just thinking about that.”
08 / evaluation
“Henrich is talking about this very unfair comparison where these guys have a 50,000 year head start and then you put this guy in, “oh, I guess this doesn’t help that much.”
09 / prediction
“We expect that as the AI labs become more capable, they tell the government about this because they want government contracts, they want government support.”
10 / belief
“I think if you were able to avoid that maybe by using the base model, maybe by using some kind of really good prompt to be like, “no, do this in Gwern’s voice”, you would get something that was pretty good.”
11 / uncertainty
“I think that with Situational Awareness, I don’t know how much publicity Leopold put into it.”
12 / belief
“Trying things can be anything from trial and error without even understanding the scientific method, without understanding writing, maybe without even having language and having to be the chimpanzees who are watching the other chimpanzees use the stick to get ants, and then in some kind of non-linguistic way this spreads, versus like the people at the top aerospace companies who are running a lot of simulations to find the exact right design, and then once they have that, they test it according to a very well designed testing process. So I think if we get the ASI and it does end up with the Dyson sphere in five years- and by the way, I think there’s only like 20% chance things go as fast as our scenario says.”
13 / uncertainty
“Everyone is still talking about Applied Divinity Studies, who hasn’t written, unless I missed something, hasn’t written much in a couple of years. I don’t know.”
14 / belief
“Partly they do it because they’re in this hive mind of hundreds of thousands of copies. But yeah, I think if you have this data efficiency such that you can learn things more quickly from fewer examples and this good research taste where you can decide what things to look at to get these examples, then you are still going to start off much worse than an Australian Aborigine who has the advantage of, let’s say 50,000 years of doing these experiments and collecting these examples.”
15 / uncertainty
“We don’t know what actual goals will end up inside the AIs and what the sort of internal structure of that will be like, what goals will be instrumental versus terminal.”
16 / evaluation
“I think both of those examples don’t work in your favor. I think the China growth miracle could not have occurred if not for their ability to copy technology from the west and I don’t think there’s a world in which they… China has a lot of really smart people, it’s a big country in general.”
17 / belief
“I think a lot of your forecast relies on, at some point, not only the US President, but also Xi Jinping, waking up to the possibility of a super intelligence and the stakes involved there.”
18 / belief
“The extra money or… Yeah. So I think that was part of it. It’s not like we’re poor.”
19 / belief
“I agree that there have been plenty of people who’ve been more bullish than me and have been already proven wrong, but they’re not me.”
20 / belief
“I think partly it would be through figuring out that high level stuff from first principles rather than having to have experienced it.”
21 / belief
“We could have a different copy of the superintelligence optimizing every single part full-time. I think that’s just a really big speed up.”
22 / uncertainty
“The same trend that has caused us to have a thousand times speed up multiplier relative to past eras and not even the Paleolithic, like what happened in the century between, I don’t know, 600 and 700 A.”
23 / belief
“Where right now, if you told your parents, “I’m going to become a startup founder”, I think the reaction would be like, “there’s a 1% chance you’ll succeed, but it’s an interesting experience and if you do succeed, that’s crazy.”
24 / belief
“If I may add to that. So by the government, I think what Scott meant is the executive branch, especially the White House.”
25 / belief
“If I could just double click on that; go back to 2015 and I think the way people typically thought, including myself, thought that we’d get to AGI would be kind of like the RL on video games thing that was happening.”
26 / belief
“I think if you were to force the AI to do this in a reasonable way, or you were to train the AI such that it itself could come up with the plan of going through this in some kind of heuristic-laden way, you could potentially equal humans.”
27 / belief
“One observation I have is, you could have told a story in 2021, once ChatGPT comes out… I think I had friends who were credible AI thinkers who were like, “look, you’ve got the coding agent now, it’s been cracked.”
28 / belief
“I think that if you want a contrast, some people in the past have proposed much faster scenarios where they email some cloud lab and start building nanotech right away by just using their brains to figure out appropriate protein folding and stuff like that.”
29 / belief
“I think I’m imagining something maybe similar happening with algorithmic progress.”
30 / uncertainty
“I don’t know what percent of people who start a blog end up making enough that they can quit their day job.”
31 / uncertainty
“Yeah. And so, for example, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know the details about how this would work out, but I have a sort of high-level strategic picture of the fight between the White House and the CEO.”
32 / belief
“I think again, in this world where everything goes perfectly and we have limitless prosperity, I think that just the default of limitless prosperity is that people do mindless consumerism.”
33 / uncertainty
“Let me just add on to that, one of the many other reasons why I worry about nationalization or some kind of public private partnership, or even just very stringent regulation- actually, this is more an argument against very stringent regulation in favor of safety rather than deferring more to the labs on the implementation- is that it just seems like we don’t know what we don’t know about alignment.”
34 / belief
“I think we’re substantially more likely to make things get the technical stuff right if it’s something like that.”
35 / belief
“I think what you’re saying is maybe this whole process just goes off the rails due to lack of contact with ground truth outside in the actual world, outside the data centers.”
36 / commitment
“” I will mention something that has actually radicalized me against Twitter as an information source is I’ll meet- and this has happened multiple times- I’ll meet somebody who seems to be an interesting poster, has funny, seemingly insightful posts on Twitter.”
37 / belief
“I think with race, it’s very easy to know whether you’re black or white, and so there have been many cases of one race kind of conspiring against another for a long time, like apartheid or any of the racial genocides that have happened.”
38 / belief
“People are going to read your blog. That, I think is one thing, is people are just afraid no one will read it, which is probably true for most people’s first blog.”
39 / belief
“I guess the bigger the organization, even if everybody is aligned- I think some of your responses addressed whether they will be aligned on goals.”
40 / belief
“I think that if the government wades in and tries to make more specific regulations along the lines of what you mentioned, it’s very plausible that it’ll end up backfiring for reasons like what you mentioned.”
41 / belief
“Again, that may turn out to be wrong, but it does look like the Metaculans overall have, have been too pessimistic, thinking too long term rather than too optimistic. And I think that’s like the closest thing we have to a neutral aggregator where we’re not cherry picking things.”
42 / belief
“I think you make a great point that discoveries don’t always come from where we think, like Nvidia originally came from gaming.”
43 / belief
“Even though they have less compute, even though they have less researchers, they’re able to do fewer experiments. So yeah, I think that there are tons of examples throughout history, including recent relevant AGI history, of things in the other way.”
44 / belief
“I agree. We’re on a totally different topic here of, do you get a Dyson sphere? There’s one world where it’s crazy but it’s still boring, in the sense that the economy is growing much faster, but it would be like what the Industrial Revolution would look like to somebody in the year 1000.”
45 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if ‘emotionally’ is the right word, but their expectation of what their life might look like, even in the world where there’s no doom.”
46 / uncertainty
“I feel like if I had started a blog in 2000 or something, then- I don’t know, I’ve done well for myself, I can’t complain- but the people from that era all founded news organizations or something.”
47 / belief
“There are many, many times more people who have written good books than who are actively operating great bloggers right now, I think.”
48 / belief
“I think there’s more opportunity for pliability there. Because humans were, of course, evolving under this genetic imperative that we want to pass on our own genetic information, not somebody else’s genetic information.”
49 / belief
“Maybe the reason that this sounds less plausible to me than the 25x number implies is that when I think about concretely what that would look like, where you have these AIs and we know that there’s a gap in data efficiency between human brains and these AIs.”
50 / evaluation
“I’ll add some more things to that. So I think there’s a long and sordid history of people looking at some limitation of the current LLMs and then making grand claims about how the whole paradigm is doomed because they’ll never overcome this limitation.”
51 / prediction
“Wait a second, I’m a little confused to hear you say that, because when I have seen people predicting AI milestones like Katja Grace’s expert surveys, they have almost always been too pessimistic from a point of view of how fast AI will advance.”
52 / prediction
“If you have a physics simulation available, then all of these real world bottlenecks don’t matter as much.”
53 / prediction
“Our scenario focuses on coding in particular because we think coding is what starts the intelligence explosion.”
54 / prediction
“I think that’s kind of analogous to the situation with the superintelligences where they have the high-level picture of, here’s how we’re going to improve in all these dimensions, we’re going to learn by doing, we’re going to get to this level of technology, et cetera.”
55 / prediction
“We’re telling it “succeed on tasks, which is going to make you a power seeker, but also don’t seek power in these particular ways”. And in our scenario, we predict that this doesn’t work and that the AI learns to seek power and then hide it.”
56 / recommendation
“I don’t think you would use one of the human ones because you would want something that was better suited for this task.”
57 / evaluation
“There’s just a constant reactive attempt to protect jobs in the most venial possible way. So things like the longshoremen union we have now where they’re making way more money than they should be, even though they could all easily be automated away, because they’re a political bloc and they’ve gotten somebody in power to say, “yes, we guarantee you’ll have this job almost as a feudal fief forever”.”
58 / evaluation
“First of all, I agree if there’s only one way to do something that makes it much harder, and maybe that one way takes very long, we’re assuming that there may be more than one way to cure cancer, more than one way to do all of these things, and they’ll be working on finding the one that is least bottlenecked.”
59 / prediction
“They might be able to get a lot of red tape waived and stuff like that. And so we made the guess that early in 2027, the company would basically be like, ‘We are going to deliberately wake up the president and scare the president with all of these demos of crazy stuff that could happen, and then use that to lobby the President to help us go faster and to cut red tape and to maybe slow down our competitors a little bit and so forth.”