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
66 published records
01 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. It wants to keep us as a zoo the same way we keep other animals in a zoo.”
02 / uncertainty
“I guess because I could be wrong and because matters are now serious enough that I have nothing left to do but go out there and tell people how it looks and maybe someone thinks of something I did not think of.”
03 / uncertainty
“I don’t know enough about how the RNN would be integrated into the thing, but that sounds plausible.”
04 / belief
“Oh, so we’re all talking about these hypothetical other people I think would make the wrong choice.”
05 / belief
“I think that if you actually go start trying to run a project of selectively encouraging some marriages between particular people and encouraging them to have children, you will rapidly find, as one does in any such process that when you select on the stuff you want, it turns out there’s a bunch of stuff correlated with it and that you’re not changing just one thing.”
06 / belief
“I think that over the last 22 years or so, we’ve seen a great lack of galaxy brained ideas playing out successfully.”
07 / belief
“I think a better analogy is if you have a child and you tell him — Hey, be this way.”
08 / belief
“I think that I was not convinced from the arguments that we could not have a system of sort of checks on this the same way you have checks on smart humans that it would try to deceive us to achieve its aims.”
09 / prediction
“I’m trying to think about whether I expect super dogs to be sufficiently in a human frame of reference in virtue of them also being mammals.”
10 / belief
“First of all, one optimistic lesson to take from there is that we actually did learn from GPT-3, not everything, but we learned many things about what the potential failure modes could be 3.”
11 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if I see the computer science of that, but I think I probably understand.”
12 / uncertainty
“You’re just going to do the thing either way. I don’t know how much time I have left.”
13 / commitment
“The hinge of this argument is we will build a powerful mind that is nonetheless too weak to have any options we wouldn’t really like.”
14 / uncertainty
“I’m not sure it’s enough to not have Hitler, but it sure would be a start on things going differently in a timeline. But mostly, I don’t know.”
15 / belief
“I think I did a fairly good job of shaping my ignorance to lead me to not be too stupid despite my ignorance over time as it played out.”
16 / belief
“I think I’d have to explain that poll pretty carefully because they haven’t got the intelligence headbands yet.”
17 / belief
“I think you would say that it just hides its intentions until it’s ready to do the thing that kills everybody.”
18 / prediction
“The reason why I tell people — “Yeah, don’t put your hope in the future, you’re probably dead”, is that the existence of this technical array of hope, if you do just the right things, is not the same as expecting that the world reshapes itself to permit that to be done without destroying the world in the meanwhile. I expect things to continue on largely as they have.”
19 / belief
“Some of my intuition here is like I know how I would do this with dogs and I think you could ask OpenAI to describe their theory of how to do it with dogs.”
20 / uncertainty
“I don’t know how to throw a billion dollars at outputting lots and lots of alignment stuff.”
21 / belief
“I agree it’s possible to imagine things being even worse. Not quite sure what the other point of the question is.”
22 / evaluation
“If your exit plan takes a long time, then you better shut down the academic AI journals and maybe you even have the Gestapo busting in people’s houses to accuse them of being underground AI researchers and I would really rather not live there and maybe even that doesn’t work.”
23 / belief
“I think people are actually going to start dedicating that level of effort they went into training GPT-4 into problems like this.”
24 / belief
“” The lectures aren’t really the parts I’m proud about. It’s like where you have the life or death, deathnote style battle of wits that is centering around a series of Bayesian updates and making that actually work because it’s where I’m like — “Yeah, I think I actually pulled that off.”
25 / belief
“I think what some people might not know is the millions and millions and millions of words of science fiction and fan fiction that you’ve written.”
26 / belief
“At the core I think what you’re describing there is a sufficiently functional society and civilization that could understand that — if they did thing X, it would lead to very bad thing Y, and so they didn’t do thing X.”
27 / commitment
“I think a better analogy is just put him in a high position in the Manhattan Project and say we will take your opinions very seriously and in fact, we even give you a lot of authority over this project.”
28 / prediction
“In historical terms, if you look out the actual battle that was being fought on the block, it was me going like — “I expect there to be AI systems that do a whole bunch of different stuff.”
29 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if it’s what you’d expect, but it’s what I would expect it to be like.”
30 / belief
“I agree that possibly at this point some of them are mad at me, but I have yet to turn down the leader of any major AI lab who has come to me asking for advice.”
31 / belief
“I think that you can plausibly have a series of intelligence enhancing drugs and other external interventions that you perform on a human brain and make people smarter.”
32 / belief
“Yeah, because it would sound weird. But I think the smarter they are, the more likely they are to go for it if it’s credible.”
33 / belief
“Eliezer Yudkowsky 3:19:29 I think I want to register for the record that the term breeding humans would cause me to look askance at any aliens who would propose that as a policy action on their part.”
34 / uncertainty
“Possibly but again, this is something that seems like, I don’t know the probability on it but I would put it at least 10%.”
35 / uncertainty
“I still think even most smart humans in that situation might disagree, but we don’t know what would happen in that situation.”
36 / belief
“I think 13 or 14 years ago you wrote an essay called Rationality is Systematized Winning.”
37 / belief
“I think you are trying to read something into this that is not meant to be there.”
38 / uncertainty
“I’m not even making a moral point. I’m just saying I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”
39 / uncertainty
“The way you describe it, it seemed kind of compelling. I don’t know why that doesn’t even rise to 1%.”
40 / belief
“What I’m saying is you’re like — “Oh, prediction. Oh, no, I don’t like my prediction.”
41 / belief
“I think you’re just wrong. I think the theory of intelligence is just flatly not that complicated.”
42 / uncertainty
“From reading your writing from earlier, it seemed like a big part of your argument was like, look — I don’t know how many total mutations it was to get from chimps to humans, but it wasn’t that many mutations.”
43 / belief
“I think that that’s substantially harder than being like — “Oh, well, I can just look at the code of the operating system and see if it has any security flaws.”
44 / belief
“I think that the Hanson-Yudkowsky foom debate was won by Gwern Branwen, but I do think that Gwern Branwen is well to the Yudkowsky side of Yudkowsky in the original foom debate.”
45 / belief
“I think the credit you would get for that, rightly, is as a good Agnostic forecaster, as somebody who is calm and measured. But it seems like to be able to make really strong claims about the future, about something that is so out of prior distributions as like the death of humanity, you don’t only have to show yourself as a good Agnostic forecaster, you have to show that your ability to forecast because of a particular theory is much greater.”
46 / belief
“If you keep on optimizing the dogs, which is not the correct course of action, I think I mostly expect this to eventually blow up on you.”
47 / prediction
“I expect them to be better than humans at science than they are at power seeking, because we had greater selection pressures for power seeking in our ancestral environment than we did for science.”
48 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if you saw his recent blog post, but here’s a quote from it: “If you really accept the practical version of the Orthogonality Thesis, then it seems to me that you can’t regard education, knowledge, and enlightenment as instruments for moral betterment.”
49 / belief
“I don’t think we’re going to live in that sane world. I think we are all going to die.”
50 / belief
“I think we’re just mainly in the territory of Hail Mary passes at this point, and human intelligence enhancement is one Hail Mary pass.”
51 / belief
“Paul Christiano and I cooperatively fought it out really hard at trying to find a place where we both had predictions about the same thing that concretely differed and what we ended up with was Paul’s 8% versus my 16% for an AI getting gold on International Mathematics Olympics problem set by, I believe, 2025.”
52 / disagreement
“We disagree about what will happen in the future once that offer is made, but lacking that information, I feel like our prior should just be the set of what we actually see in the world today.”
53 / belief
“I don’t think you can even upvote downvote very well on that sort of thing. I think if you upvote-downvote, it learns to exploit the human readers.”
54 / evaluation
“Getting stuff to be more likely does not help you if the baseline is nearly zero.”
55 / observation
“Something that makes you think the problem is twice as hard, you go from like 99% to like 99.”
56 / belief
“Show me the happy world where we can build something smarter than us and not and not just immediately die. I think we got plenty of stuff to figure out in GPT-4.”
57 / evaluation
“You could ask GPT-4 to generate 10,000 approaches to alignment and that does not get you very far because GPT-4 is not going to have very good suggestions. It’s good that we have a bunch of different people coming up with different ideas because maybe one of them works, but you don’t get a bunch of conditionally independent chances on each one.”
58 / evaluation
“I’m too stupid to solve alignment and I’m too stupid to execute a handshake with a superintelligence that I told somebody else how to align in a cleverly, deceptive way where that superintelligence ended up in the kind of basin of logical decision theory, handshakes or any number of other methods that I myself am too stupid to a vision because I’m too stupid to solve alignment. The point is — I think about this stuff.”
59 / recommendation
“Look at those genes to see if you can extrapolate out the whole proteinomics and the actual interactions and figure out what our likely candidates are if you administer this to an adult, because we do not have time to raise kids from scratch.”
60 / prediction
“At some point you know yourself especially well and you are able to rewrite yourself and at some point there, unless you specifically choose not to, I think that the system crystallizes.”
61 / evaluation
“If you ask me to play a part of somebody who’s quite unlike me, I think there’s some amount of penalty that the character I’m playing gets to his intelligence because I’m secretly back there simulating him.”
62 / recommendation
“I could say go study evolutionary biology because evolutionary biology went through a phase of optimism and people naming all the wonderful things they thought that evolutionary biology would cough out, all the wonderful properties that they thought natural selection would imbue into organisms.”
63 / evaluation
“The academic literature would have to be seen to be believed. But the point is the one major technical contribution that I’m proud of, which is not all that precedented and you can look at the literature and see it’s not all that precedented, would in fact have been a way for something that knew about that technical innovation to build a superintelligence that would kill you and extract value itself from that superintelligence in a way that would just completely blindside the literature as it existed prior to that technical contribution.”
64 / evaluation
“If you keep fantasies like that aside, then I think that in the end, even if this world ends up having less time, it was the right thing to do rather than just letting everybody sleepwalk into death and get there a little later.”
65 / prediction
“I think yes but more abstractly, the steps from the initial accident to the thing that kills everyone will not be understood in the same way.”
66 / prediction
“Because allegedly, and we will see, people right now are able to appreciate that things are storming ahead a bit faster than the ability to ensure any sort of good outcome for them.”