Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 10evaluation 8uncertainty 4preference 3commitment 2prediction 1
Evidence policy
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.
28 published records
“Afterwards, when pushes into big reinforcement learning efforts kind of all fizzled out—like post-Dota, as the reinforcement learning wasn't working out for solving those hard problems outside of the simulated game universes—then I started thinking, “Okay, maybe we kinda overshot there…” But then GPT came out of nowhere and basically erased all that.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“In any kind of niche where it's static, or where intelligence will be super expensive, or where you don't have much time because you're a short-lived organism, it's going to be hard to evolve a general purpose learning mechanism when you could instead evolve one that's tailored to the specific problem that you encounter.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“That's kind of the rubric. Is this something I want to do regardless of any future AI, because I enjoy it?”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“When you only can do a few instances, you would typically find that it doesn't work, and you would give up and you would go away and do something else.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I have learned far more from editing Wikipedia than I learned from any of my school or college training.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think that’s going to tell us something important about human willpower and dysfunctionality.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I would say that the characteristic they have is taking non-human intelligence seriously.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If you aren't obsessed with it and continually driven by it, it's not a rabbit hole. That’s my view.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“The 10,000 foot view of intelligence, that I think the success of scaling points to, is that all intelligence is is search over Turing machines.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Maybe it can be something like a Substack, or just writing on the side while slinging Javascript for a tech company. I don’t know.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“When I was a kid, I did not understand that essay, but I think I understand it now.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think I get a lot more mileage out of arguing with people online than… pretty much any other writer does.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think I've amputated my life in many respects professionally and personally, especially in terms of travel.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I would say I'm not really all that smart, compared to many people I've known, who update very fast on the fly.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I don’t know. When I look at the ways in which my smart friends are smart, it just feels more like a general horsepower kind of thing.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If someone wanted to give me, I don’t know, $50–100K/year to move to SF and continue writing full-time like I do now, I'd take it in a heartbeat.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Borges has a short poem called "Borges and I" where he talks about how he doesn’t identify with the version of himself that is actually doing the writing and publishing all of this great work. I don’t know if you identify with that at all.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think the odds of there being something as bad as lead is almost 100%. We have so many things out there.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I could have easily cut it down to 20 novels or short stories which actually were good enough and insightful enough to actually change my view.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I would say that what's more interesting is that nobody wants to train agents in a proper reinforcement learning way.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“One of my favorite blog posts of yours is “Evolution as Backstop for RL,” where you talk about evolution as basically a mechanism to learn a better learning process.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Then, as I read more and more of the meta reinforcement learning literature, from DeepMind especially, I added in material about neural networks.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Other times —when I started watching for this pattern—I would say, "Oh yes, ‘pain’ is a good example of this.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“No reasonable person would do that, but they did because they wanted the trick to really pay off.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I refuse to believe that there are two totally unrelated kinds of intelligence, or paths to intelligence—where humans, monkeys, guppies, dogs are all one thing, and then neural networks and computers are another thing—and they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Yes, I like going to the gym—not because I'm any kind of meathead or athlete or even really enjoy weightlifting—but because it's the most diametrically opposite thing I can do to sitting in front of a computer.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I thought it was ludicrous to suggest that simply because there’s some supercomputer out there which matches the human brain, then that would just summon out of nonexistence the correct algorithm.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I had been a little bit interested in Bitcoin, but not too seriously interested in it because it was not obvious to me that it was going to work out, or even was technologically feasible.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast