Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses
Episode Date: April 7, 2026Really enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress.It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop...
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122 episodes transcribedReally enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress.It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop...
We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion.People sometimes say tha...
Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, provides a deep dive into the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute: logic, memory, and power.And walks throug...
Read the full essay here: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropicTimestamps00:00:00 - Anthropic vs The Pentagon00:04:16 - The overhangs of tyranny00:...
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer b...
Dario Amodei thinks we are just a few years away from AGI — or as he puts it, from having “a country of geniuses in a data center”. In this episode, w...
In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power...
Adam Marblestone has worked on brain-computer interfaces, quantum computing, formal mathematics, nanotech, and AI research. And he thinks AI is missin...
Read the essay here.Timestamps00:00:00 What are we scaling?00:03:11 The value of human labor00:05:04 Economic diffusion lag is cope00:06:34 Goal-post...
Sarah gives a “tour of the arguments” on what ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse, diving into the role of the US, the Sino-Soviet border co...
Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well.Watch...
As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and me an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 data...
In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for ov...
The Andrej Karpathy episode.During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI...
Nick Lane has some pretty wild ideas about the evolution of life.He thinks early life was continuous with the spontaneous chemistry of undersea hydrot...
I have a much better understanding of Sutton’s perspective now. I wanted to reflect on it a bit.(00:00:00) - The steelman(00:02:42) - TLDR of my curre...
Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dea...
Sergey Levine, one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement fl...
In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany duri...
Jacob Kimmel thinks he can find the transcription factors to reverse aging. We do a deep dive on why this might be plausible and why evolution hasn’t...