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Dwarkesh Podcast
AMA ft. Sholto & Trenton: New Book, Career Advice Given AGI, How I'd Start From Scratch
00:49:33
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- [00:00]
Dwarkesh Patel
Today, this is going to be an ask me anything episode. I'm joined with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholta Douglas. You guys do some AI stuff. All right, Dabble. They're researchers at Anthropic. Other news, I have a book launching today. It's called A Scaling Era. I hope one of the questions ends up being why you should buy this book. But we can come. Two words with one stone. But okay, let's just get at it. What's the first question that we got to answer?
- [00:28]
Trenton Bricken
Take this away.
- [00:29]
Sholta Douglas
So I want to ask the flyball question that I heard before of why should ordinary people care about this book? Why should my mom buy and read the book?
- [00:38]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. First, let me tell you about the book, what it is. So, you know, these last few years, I've been interviewing AI lab CEOs, researchers, people like you guys, obviously, but also scholars from all kinds of different fields. Economists, philosophers. And they've been addressing, I think, what are basically the gnarliest, most interesting, most important questions we've ever had to ask ourselves. Like, what is the fundamental nature of intelligence? What will happen when we have billions of extra workers? How do we model out the economics of that? How do we think about an intelligence that is greater than the rest of humanity combined? Is that even a coherent concept? And so what I'm super delighted with is that with Stripe Press, we made this book where we compiled and curated the best, most insightful snippets across all these interviews. And you can read Dario addressing wider scaling work. And then on the next page is Demis explaining DeepMind's plans for whether they're gonna go the RL route and how much of the alphazero stuff will play into the next generation of LLMs. And on the next page is, of course, you guys going through the technical details of how these models work. And then there's so many different fields that are implicated. I mean, I feel like AI is one of the most multidisciplinary fields that one can imagine, because there's no field, no domain of human knowledge that is not relevant to understanding what a future society of different kinds of beings will look like. You can have Carl Shulman talk about how the scaling hypothesis shows up in primate brain scaling from chimpanzees to humans. On the next page might be an economist trying to argue, like Tyler Cowen, explaining why he doesn't expect explosive economic growth and why the bottlenecks will eat all that up. Anyways. So that's why your mom should buy this book. It just like it Is the distillation of all these different fields of human knowledge apply to the most important questions that humanity is facing right now?
- [02:40]
Sholta Douglas
I do like how the book is sliced up by different topics and across interviews. So it does seem like a nice way to listen to all of the interviews in one digestible way.
- [02:52]
Dwarkesh Patel
There's two interviews I've done that haven't been released publicly before that are in the book. So one was with Jared Kaplan, who's one of your co founders. And this is another example where it's like he's a physicist and he's explaining scaling from this very mathematical perspective about data manifolds. And then on the next page, you have a totally different perspective. It's like Goran talking about, you know, why can't we just have distilled, like, why did general intelligence actually evolve in the first place? What is the actual evolutionary purpose of it? And it's like page by page, right? You can just get addresses. Even for me, I mean, like the person who's been on the other end of these conversations, it was actually really cool to read it and just be like, oh, actually now I realize how these insights connect to each other.
- [03:37]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah. The only other thing that stood out to me as well is the introduction section.
- [03:40]
Dwarkesh Patel
The only thing that stood out to you?
- [03:42]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah, yeah, that was really the only thing that was noteworthy. I just mean stood out in accessibility is the introduction section and the diagrams for all the different inputs that enable you to train a machine learning model. Stripe press books are also just beautiful and have these nice side captions for explaining what parameters are, what a model is, these sorts of things.
- [04:06]
Dwarkesh Patel
Actually, when we did our episode together, a bunch of people. I don't know if you saw this independently made these like, blog posts and Anki cards and shit where they were like, explaining the concept because we just kind of passed over some things and hopefully we've given a similar treatment to every single interview I've done where you can read a very technical interview with a lab CEO or something, or an engineer or a researcher, and then the side is like, here's more context, here's more definitions, here's more commentary. And yeah, I feel like it elevated the conversations, so.
- [04:38]
Trenton Bricken
So in other words, my parents will finally understand what I do for a job. Why would they? Do they get it very well?
- [04:44]
Dwarkesh Patel
Maybe my parents will.
- [04:48]
Sholta Douglas
All I need to know is that my name's in a book.
- [04:50]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, you're a co author.
- [04:53]
Sholta Douglas
They're like, cool.
- [04:55]
Trenton Bricken
Should we get into the AMA question? All right, so Brian Krav asks the issue you raise with Dario and occasionally tweet about relating to models, not making connections across disparate topics. Sort of combinatorial attention challenge. What are your thoughts on that now? Do you solve it with scale thinking models or something else, by the way?
- [05:11]
Dwarkesh Patel
So the issue is, one of the questions they asked Dario is, look, these models have all of human knowledge memorized. And you would think if a human had this much stuff memorized and they were moderately intelligent, they could be making all these connections between different fields. And there are examples of humans doing this, by the way, there's Donald Swan or something like this. This guy noticed that what happens to your brain after magnesium deficiency is exactly the kinds of, I don't know, structure you see during a migraine. So he's like, okay, you take magnesium supplements and we're going to cure a bunch of migraines. And it worked. And there's many other examples of things like this where you just notice two different connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, if these LLMs are intelligent, are they not able to use this unique advantage they have to make these kinds of discoveries? I feel a little shy, like me giving answers on AI shit with you guys here. So actually, Scott Alexander addressed this question in one of his AMA threads and he's like, look, humans also don't have this kind of logical omniscience, right? Use the example of in language, if you really thought about why are two words connected? It's like, oh, I understand why rhyme has the same etymology as another word, if you really thought about, but you just don't think about it, right? There's this combinatorial explosion. I don't know if that addresses the fact that we know humans can do this, right? The humans have in fact done this. And I don't know of a single example of LLMs ever having done it, actually. What is your answer to this?
- [06:38]
Trenton Bricken
I think my answer at the moment is that the pre training objective doesn't necessarily it imbues you with this nice flexible general knowledge about the world, but doesn't necessarily imbue the like the skill of making novel connections or research the kinds of things that people are trained to do through PhD programs and through the process of exploring and interacting with the world. And so I think at a minimum, you need significant RL in at least similar things to be able to approach making novel discoveries. And so I would like to see some early evidence of this as we start to build models that are sort of interacting with one, trying to make scientific discoveries and sort of like modeling the behaviors that we expect of people in these positions because I don't actually think we've done that in a meaningful or scaled way as a field, so to speak.
- [07:28]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah, riffing off that. With respect to rl, I wonder if models currently just aren't good at knowing what memories they should be storing. Most of their training is just predicting the next word on the Internet and remembering very specific facts from that. But if you were to teach me something new right now I'm very aware of my own memory limitations, and so I would try to construct some summary that would stick. And models currently don't have the opportunity to do that. Memory scaffolding in general is just very primitive right now, right?
- [08:00]
Trenton Bricken
Like Clawplace. Pokemon. Exactly. Yeah.
- [08:02]
Sholta Douglas
Where like someone worked on it. It was awesome. It got far. But another excited anthropic employee then iterated on the memory scaffold and was able to very quickly improve on it. Interesting. So, yeah, that's one. I do also just wonder if models are idiot savants. The best analogy might be to Kim Peek. So Kim Peek was born without a corpus callosum. If I recall correctly, each hemisphere of his brain operated quite independently. He could read a page of a book. So he'd open a book, there'd be two pages visible. Each eye would read one of the pages. And he had like a perfect encyclopedic memory of everything he'd ever read. But at the same time, he had other debilitations, functioning socially, these sorts of things. And it's just kind of Amazing how good LLMs are at very niche topics, but can totally fail at other ones.
- [08:55]
Dwarkesh Patel
Still, I really want to double click on this thing of why there's this trade off between memorization. Like, yeah, why does cutting it off? Apparently it's sort of. It's connected to this debilitation. But why can't we like wiki text? Is not that like five megabytes of information the human brain can store much more? So why does the human brain just not want us to memorize these kinds of things? And is it actively pruning and. Yeah, I don't know. But we don't have to do it right now. We'll do a separate episode.
- [09:22]
Sholta Douglas
The one thing I'll say on that is there is another case study of someone with a perfect memory so they never forgot anything but their memory was too debilitating. It'd be like your context window for the transformer is like trillions of tokens. And then you spend all your time attending to past things and are too trapped in the details to extract any meaningful generalizable insights from it.
- [09:45]
Dwarkesh Patel
Terence Deakin, whose book you recommended, had this interesting insight about how we learn best when we're children, but we forget literally everything that happened to us when we were children. Right. We have total amnesia and adults have this in between where we don't remember exact details, but we can still learn in a pretty decent way. And then LLMs are on the opposite end of this gradient where they'll get the exact phrasing of wikitext down, but they won't be able to generalize in these very obvious ways.
- [10:11]
Trenton Bricken
A little bit like Gwen's theory, optimizer theory. No.
- [10:14]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I probably got it from that.
- [10:17]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah, yeah. Gwen has definitely had a big influence on all this for me.
- [10:20]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right. Yeah. I mean, I feel like what's underappreciated on the podcast is like we have this group chat and we also just meet up a lot in person and, and just all the offer from the podcast just comes from you and a couple other people just feeding me ideas and nudges and whatever, and then I can just use that as an intuition pump during the conversation.
- [10:40]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah, you're not the only one.
- [10:42]
Dwarkesh Patel
What do you mean?
- [10:43]
Sholta Douglas
Oh, like I'd benefit immensely from just hearing what everyone else has to say and then, yeah, it's all regurgitation in one way.
- [10:51]
Trenton Bricken
Another question.
- [10:52]
Sholta Douglas
Yes, maybe rabid. Maybe rabid. Monkey asks. Imagine you have a 17 year old brother, nephew, just starting college. What would you recommend he study given your AGI timelines?
- [11:08]
Dwarkesh Patel
I don't know. Become a podcaster. I feel like that job's still going to be around. It's funny because I studied computer science and in retrospect at the time you could have become a software engineer or something, instead you became a podcaster. It's kind of an irresponsible career move, but in retrospect, it's like it kind of worked out just as these guys are getting automated.
- [11:27]
Trenton Bricken
I get asked this question all the time. Yes. Okay, go ahead. And one answer that I like to give is that you should think about the next couple of years as increasing your individual leverage by a huge factor every year. So already software engineers will come up and say I'm two times faster or in new languages, I'm five times faster than I was last year. I expect that trend line to continue. Basically, as you sort of go from this model of I'm working with some model that's assisting me on my computer and it's like, like basically a Pairing session to I'm managing a small team through to I'm managing like a division or a company basically that is like targeting a task. And so I think that deep technical knowledge in fields will still matter in four years, like it absolutely will because you will be in the position of managing dozens or like, like your sort of, your, your individual management bandwidth will be maxed out by trying to, to manage like teams of AIs and this kind of thing. And maybe AI is, maybe we end up like a truly singularity world where you have AIs managing AIs and this kind of stuff. But I think in a very wide part of the possibility spectrum, you are managing enormous, vastly more resources than an individual could command today. And you should be able to solve so many more things with that.
- [12:41]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right. And I think I would emphasize that this is not just cope. It genuinely is the case that these models lack the kind of long term coherence where, which is like absolutely necessary for making a successful company. Just like getting a fucking office is like kind of complicated. Right. It's like you had to deal with all these. So you can just imagine that for a sector after sector, like the economy.
- [13:01]
Trenton Bricken
Is really big and really complex.
- [13:03]
Dwarkesh Patel
Exactly. And so especially if it's. I mean, I don't know the details, but I assume if it's like a data sparse thing where you kind of just like gotta know what's actually, what is the context of what's happening in the sector or something, I feel like you'd be in a good position maybe. The other thought I have is that it's. It's really hard to plan your career in general. And I don't know what advice that implies because I remember being super frustrated. I mean I was in college and the reason I was doing the podcast was to figure out what it is I want to do. It wasn't the podcast itself. It would go on 80,000 hours or whatever. Career advice. And it's just like in retrospect it was all kind of mostly useless. And just try doing things. I mean, especially with AI, we just don't know what it's going to like. It's so hard to forecast what kind of transformations there will be. So try things, do things. I mean, it's such banal, vague advice. But I am quite skeptical of career advice in general.
- [13:54]
Trenton Bricken
Well, maybe the piece of career advice I'm not skeptical of is put yourself close to the frontier because you have a much better vantage point.
- [14:00]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right.
- [14:01]
Trenton Bricken
Right. Like you can study deep technical things Whether it's computer science or biology or like, and get to the point where you can see what the issues are because it's actually like remarkably obvious at the frontier what the problems are and it's very difficult to see.
- [14:15]
Dwarkesh Patel
But actually, do you think there is an opportunity? Because one of the things people bring up is maybe the people who are advancing their career and have all this tacit knowledge will be in a position to be accelerated by AI. But you guys, four years ago or two years ago, when you were getting discovered or something, that kind of thing, where you have a GitHub open issue and you try to solve it, is that just like that's done? And so the onboarding is much harder.
- [14:38]
Trenton Bricken
That's still what we look for in hiring.
- [14:42]
Sholta Douglas
I'm in favor of the learn fundamentals, gain useful mental models. But it feels like everything should be done in an AI native way or top down instead of your bottom up learning. So first of all, learn things more efficiently by using the AI models and then just know where their capabilities are and aren't. And I would be worried and skeptical about any subject which prioritizes wrote memorization of lots of facts or information instead of ways of thinking. But if you're always using the AI tools to help you, then you'll naturally just have a good sense for the things that it is and isn't good at.
- [15:17]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right.
- [15:19]
Trenton Bricken
Next one, what is your strategy, method or criteria for choosing guests?
- [15:24]
Dwarkesh Patel
The most important thing is, do I want to spend one to two weeks reading every single thing you have ever written, every single interview ever recorded, talking to a bunch of other people about your research? Cause I get asked by people who are quite influential often to be like, would you have me on your podcast? And more often than not I say no for two reasons. One is just like, okay, you're influential or something. It's not fundamentally that interesting as an interview prospect. Not from like, I don't think about the hour that I'll spend with you. I think about the two weeks because this is my life, right? The research is my life and I want to have fun while doing it. So just like, is this going to be an interesting two weeks to spend? Is it going to help me with my future research or something? And the other is big guests don't really matter that much if you just look at what are the most popular episodes or what in the long run helps the podcast grow. By far my most popular guest is Sarah Payne. And she, before I interviewed her, was just like a scholar who was not publicly well known at all. And I just found her books quite interesting. Same goes with. So my most popular guests are Sarah Payne and then. Sarah Payne. Sarah Payne. Sarah Payne. Because I did an electric series with her. That's awesome. And by the way, from a viewer a minute adjusted basis, I host a Sarah Payne podcast where I occasionally talk about AI. And then it's David Reich who is a geneticist of ancient DNA. I mean he's like somewhat well known, but he had a best selling book. But he's not like, he's not Satya Nadella or Mark Zuckerberg. Who are the next people on the list? And then again, I think pretty soon it's you guys or Leopold or something. And then you get to the lab CEOs or something. So big names just don't matter that much for what I'm actually trying to do. And so it's just like. Well, and it's also really hard to predict who's gonna be the David Reich or Sarah Payne. So just like have fun, talk to whoever you want to spend time researching. And it's a pretty good proxy for what will actually be popular.
- [17:19]
Trenton Bricken
What was the specific moment, if there was one, that you realized that producing your podcast was a viable long term strategy?
- [17:26]
Dwarkesh Patel
I think when I was shopping around ad spots for a Mark Zuckerberg episode and which are, you know, like now that when I look back on it it's like not in retrospect that mind blowing, but at the time I'm like, oh, I could actually hire an editor full time or maybe more editors than one. And from there like turning into a real business. That's when I, cause before I just like didn't people would tell me like, oh, these other podcasts are making whatever, whatever amount of money. And I'd be like, how? You know, I have this running joke with one of my friends that I don't know if you've seen me do this, but every time I encounter a young person who's like, what should I do with my life? I'm like, you gotta start a blog. You gotta be the Matt Levine of AI. You can do this. It's like a totally empty niche. And I had this running joke with them where they're like, you're like a country bumpkin who's won the lottery and you're like every single person. Like, guys, the scratch pad, get the scratch pad.
- [18:24]
Sholta Douglas
I do want to press on that a bit more because your immediate answer to the 17 year old was to start a podcast.
- [18:30]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- [18:31]
Sholta Douglas
So like what niches are there what sort of things would you be excited to see in like new blogs, podcasts?
- [18:36]
Dwarkesh Patel
I mean, I wonder if you guys think this too, but I think this like Matt Levine of AI yeah, absolutely. Is like a totally open niche as far as I can tell. And I apologize to those who are trying to fill it in.
- [18:48]
Sholta Douglas
I was like, oh, I'm aware of at least one blog that's trying to do this.
- [18:52]
Dwarkesh Patel
But the other thing I'd really emphasize is it is really hard to do this based on other people's advice or to say like, here's a niche. I'm like, I. At least I'm trying not to fill like a specific niche. And if you think about any sort of successful new media thing out there, it has two things which are true. It's like often not just geared towards one particular topic or interest. And two, the most important thing is that it is propelled by a single person's vision. It's not like a collective or whatever. And so I would just really emphasize. Sorry. The thing I really want to emphasize is it can be done. Two, you can make a lot of money at it, which is not the most important thing probably for the kind of person who would succeed at it. But still it's just worth knowing that it's a viable career. Three, that, yeah, that basically you're going to feel like shit in the beginning where it's like all your early stuff is gonna kinda suck. Maybe some of it will get appreciated, but it seems like bad advice to say still stick through it in case you actually are terrible. Cause some people are terrible, but in case you are not, just do it. Right. What is the three months of blogging on the side really gonna cost you? And people just don't actually seriously do the thing for long enough to actually get evidence or get the sort of RL feedback on. Oh, this is how you do it. This is how you frame an argument. This is how you make a compelling thing that people will want to read or watch.
- [20:17]
Trenton Bricken
Blogging is definitely underrated. I think most of us have probably.
- [20:20]
Dwarkesh Patel
You both had blogs which are relevant. I don't know if they're actually relevant to getting that they were like somewhat relevant.
- [20:27]
Trenton Bricken
But I think more so that we have all read almost all the blogs that do in depth treatises on AI.
- [20:33]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right.
- [20:34]
Trenton Bricken
If you write something that is high quality is almost invariably going to be shared around Twitter and Red.
- [20:40]
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, this is so underappreciated. So two pieces of evidence. I was talking to a very famous blogger, you would know and I was Asking him, how often do you discover a new undiscovered blogger? And he was like, it happens very rarely. Maybe once a year. And they ask him, how long after you discover him or her does the rest of the world discover them? And he's like, maybe a week.
- [21:04]
Sholta Douglas
Interesting.
- [21:05]
Dwarkesh Patel
And what that suggests is it's actually really efficient. Oh. So I have some more takes.
- [21:12]
Trenton Bricken
This is the mma.
- [21:14]
Dwarkesh Patel
So I believe that slow compounding growth in media is kind of fake. Like Leopold's situational awareness. It's not like it was willing to have an audience for a long time, for years or something. Just like, it was really good. Disagree or agree with it. And if it's good enough, literally everybody who matters, and I mean that literally, will read it. I mean, I think it's hard to, like, zero a shot, something like that. But the fundamental thing to emphasize is the compounding growth, at least for me, has been. I feel like I've gotten better. And it's not so much that somehow the three years of having 1000 followers was somehow a compounding. You know, I don't think it was that. I think it was just, like, it took a while to get better.
- [21:54]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah. Certainly when Leopold posted that, like, the next day, it's almost like you can picture it, like, being almost stapled. Not it wasn't, but it was stapled to walls, so to speak. On Twitter, everyone was talking about it. You went to any for the following week. Every single person in the entire city was talking about that essay.
- [22:10]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- [22:10]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah. It's like Renaissance Florence.
- [22:12]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. The world is small.
- [22:14]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah. What would you say was your first big success? I'm trying to think back to when I first found your podcast. I distinctly remember you had your blog post on the annus mirabilis, and Jeff Bezos retweeted it, I think. I'm trying to remember if it was even before that or not, but, yeah. What? I'm curious. Your answer.
- [22:32]
Dwarkesh Patel
I feel like that was it.
- [22:32]
Sholta Douglas
Okay.
- [22:33]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah.
- [22:33]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. I mean, it wasn't something where I'm like, it was some big insight that deserved to blow up like that. It was just taking some shots on goal. They were all like, whatever inside porny. And then one of them, I guess, caught the right guy's attention, but I think that was it. Yeah.
- [22:49]
Trenton Bricken
That's something else which is underappreciated, which is that a piece of writing doesn't need to have a fundamentally new insight so much as give people a way to express cleanly a set of Ideas that they already are, like, aware of in a sort of broader way. And if it's really crisp and articulate, then even still, that's very valuable.
- [23:05]
Dwarkesh Patel
And, sorry, the one thing I should emphasize which I think is maybe the most important thing to the feedback loop, it's not the compounding growth of the audience. I don't even think it's the compounding. Like, it's me getting more shots on goal in terms of doing the podcast. I actually don't think you improve that much by just doing the same thing again and again. If there's no reward signal, you'll keep doing whatever you were doing before. I genuinely think the most important thing has been the podcast is good enough that it merits me getting to meet people like you guys, that I become friends with people like you. You guys teach me stuff. I produce more good podcasts, hopefully slightly better. That helps me meet people in other fields. They teach me more things. Like with the China thing. Recently, I wrote this blog post about a couple stories about things that happen in China, and that alone has netted me an amazing China network in the matter of one blog post. Right. And so hopefully if I do an episode on China, it will be better as a result. And hopefully that happens across field after field. And so just getting to meet people like you is actually the main sort of flywheel.
- [24:08]
Trenton Bricken
Interesting. So move to San Francisco.
- [24:10]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yes. If you're trying to do AI.
- [24:12]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah. Next questions. Shall we do.
- [24:16]
Sholta Douglas
Can we do a.
- [24:19]
Trenton Bricken
Very important question from Jacked Pajeet? How much can you bench?
- [24:26]
Sholta Douglas
You can't lie because we both know the answer.
- [24:30]
Dwarkesh Patel
At one point, I did bench two. 25 for four. Now I think I'm probably like 20 pounds lighter than that or something. The reason you guys are asking me this is because I've gone left wing with both of you. And I remember Trent and I were doing pull ups and bench, and then we like bench, and he'd, like, throw on another plate or something, and then instead of pull ups, he'd be cranking out these muscle ups.
- [24:59]
Sholta Douglas
It's all technique.
- [25:03]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. So they both bench more than me, but I'm trying my best.
- [25:07]
Sholta Douglas
Ask again in six months.
- [25:09]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. What's your favorite history book? There's a wall of them behind you.
- [25:18]
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh. I mean, obviously the Kiro LBJ biographies.
- [25:21]
Trenton Bricken
Oh, okay.
- [25:21]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, yeah, sorry. The main thing I took away from those books is LBJ had this quote that he would tell his debate school. In his early 20s, he taught debate to these poor Mexican students in Texas, and he used to Tell them if you do everything, you'll win. I think it's an underrated quote. So that's the main thing I took away. And you see it through his entire career where there's a reasonable amount of effort which goes by like 20 80. You do the 20 to get the 80% of the effect. And then if you go beyond that to get like, oh, no, I'm not just gonna do 20%. I'm gonna just do the whole thing. And there's a level even beyond that which is like, this is just an unreasonable use of time. This is gonna have no ultimate impact. And still try doing that.
- [26:04]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah, you've shared on Twitter using Anki and even a Claude integration. Do you do book clubs? Do you use Goodreads and what are you reading right now?
- [26:16]
Dwarkesh Patel
I don't use. I don't have book clubs. But the Spacefire edition has just genuinely been a huge uplift in my ability to learn. Mostly because it's not even the long term impact over years, though I think that is part of it. And I do regret all the episodes I did without using space for my cars because all the insights have just sort of faded away. The main thing is if you're studying a complicated subject, at least for me, it's been super helpful to consolidate. So it's like if you don't do it, you feel like a general, where you're like, I'm going to wage a campaign against this country. And then you climb one hill and then the next day you got to retreat and then you climb the same hill. There might be a sort of more kosher analogy. Sorry. And the other question was, what am I reading right now?
- [27:05]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah.
- [27:06]
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, my friend, Alvaro de Menard, author of Fantastic Anachronism. Can I just pull it up? Actually, it's right here.
- [27:13]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah.
- [27:14]
Dwarkesh Patel
I hope he's okay with me sharing this, but he wrote, he made like 100 copies of this translation he did of his favorite Greek poet. And they're like, yeah, cavafy. Hopefully I didn't mispronounce it. That one has an inscription for Gwern, because that's his coffee. But. But it's super delightful. And that's what I've been reading recently.
- [27:36]
Sholta Douglas
Any insights from it so far?
- [27:38]
Dwarkesh Patel
Poets will hate this framing. I feel like poetry is like. It's like TikTok, where. Where it's like you get this like quick vibe of a certain thing and then you like, like swipe. And then you get the next vibe. Swipe. I'll viral. I'm sorry, that's interesting.
- [28:04]
Trenton Bricken
How do you go about learning new things or preparing for an episode? Like what is that? You mentioned the one to two week period where you're deep diving on the person. What does that actually look like?
- [28:13]
Dwarkesh Patel
It's very much the obvious thing. You read their books, they have papers, you read the papers. If they have colleagues, you try to talk to them to better understand the field. I will also mention that all I have to do is ask them questions and I do think it's a much. I think it's much harder to learn a field, to be a practitioner than just learn enough to ask interesting questions. But yeah, for that it's very much the obvious thing you'd expect based Carl.
- [28:38]
Sholta Douglas
Sagan asks, what are your long term goals and ambitions?
- [28:45]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, the AGI kind of just makes the prospect of a long term harder to articulate. Right. You know the Peter Thiel quote about what is your 10 year plan and why can't you do it in six months? It's especially salient given timelines for the foreseeable future. Grow the podcast and do more episodes, maybe more writing. But yeah, so we'll see what happens after like 10 years or something. The world might be different enough. Yeah. So basically, podcast for now, something you've.
- [29:18]
Trenton Bricken
Spoken to me about, and particularly when you're trying to hire people for the podcast, was what you wanted to achieve with the podcast. In what way do you want the podcast to shape the world, so to speak? Do you have any thoughts on that? Because I remember you talking like, I really want people to actually understand AI and how this might change their lives or what we could be doing now to shape the world such that it ends up better.
- [29:40]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, I don't know. So I have contradictory views on this. On the one hand, I do know that important decisions are being made right now in AI. And I do think riffing on what we were saying about situational awareness, if you do something really good, it has a very high probability of one shotting the relevant person. People are just generally reasonable. If you make a good argument, it will go places. On the other hand, I just think it's very hard to know what should be done. You got to have the very correct world model and then you got to know how in that world model the action you're taking is going to have the effect you anticipate. And even in the last week I've changed my mind on some pretty fundamental things about what I think about the possibility of an intelligence explosion or transformative AI as a result of talking to the Epoch folks, Basically, the TLDR is. I want the podcast to just be an epistemic tool for now until I. Because I think it's just very easy to be wrong. And so just having a background level of understanding of the relevant arguments is the highest priority.
- [30:46]
Trenton Bricken
Makes sense.
- [30:47]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. What's your sense? What should I be doing?
- [30:49]
Sholta Douglas
I mean, I think the podcast is awesome, and a lot more people should listen to it, and there are a lot more guests I'd be excited for you to interview.
- [30:56]
Dwarkesh Patel
Nice.
- [30:57]
Sholta Douglas
Seems pretty good. Seems like a pretty good answer for now.
- [30:59]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah. I think making sure that, like, there is a great debate of ideas on not just AI, but on, like, other fields and everything is incredibly high leverage and value. How do you groom your beard? It's majestic.
- [31:15]
Dwarkesh Patel
I don't know what to say. Just genetics.
- [31:20]
Trenton Bricken
I do trim it, but no beard oil.
- [31:22]
Dwarkesh Patel
Sometimes I do beard oil.
- [31:24]
Sholta Douglas
How often?
- [31:25]
Dwarkesh Patel
Once every couple of days.
- [31:26]
Trenton Bricken
Okay, that's not sometimes. That's pretty often.
- [31:30]
Sholta Douglas
Do you have different shampoo for your head and your beard?
- [31:32]
Dwarkesh Patel
No.
- [31:32]
Sholta Douglas
What kind of shampoo do you use?
- [31:34]
Dwarkesh Patel
Anti dandruff.
- [31:36]
Sholta Douglas
Do you condition that?
- [31:39]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- [31:40]
Sholta Douglas
How often do you shave it? We're giving people the answers that they want.
- [31:49]
Trenton Bricken
Big beard oil. Yeah.
- [31:51]
Sholta Douglas
You can sell some ad slots to different shampoo companies, and we can edit it.
- [31:55]
Trenton Bricken
Maybe we sold an ad slot.
- [31:58]
Dwarkesh Patel
Sorry, you had this idea of merchant. Do you want to explain this?
- [32:01]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah. So people should react to this. Someone should make it happen. Dwarkesh wants merch, but he doesn't want to admit that he wants it or he doesn't want to make it himself because that seems tacky.
- [32:11]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- [32:11]
Sholta Douglas
So I really want a plain white tee with just Dwarkesh's beard in the center of it. That's it. Nothing else.
- [32:18]
Dwarkesh Patel
But you were saying it should be, like, have a different texture than the rest of the shirt.
- [32:21]
Sholta Douglas
Oh. So I'm really ripping off it. Where maybe, like, a limited edition set can have some of your beard hair actually sewn into the shirt. That'd be pretty cool. I would pay. I would pay for that.
- [32:35]
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. How much? I've got, like, patches all over my beard.
- [32:40]
Sholta Douglas
Depends on how much hair. If it's like, one is, like, in there somewhere versus the whole thing. Like, do I have to dry clean it? Can I wash it as, like, on the delicate setting?
- [32:48]
Dwarkesh Patel
Like.
- [32:52]
Sholta Douglas
But really, I think you should get merch. If you want to grow the podcast, which apparently you do, then this is.
- [32:58]
Dwarkesh Patel
One way to do it.
- [33:03]
Trenton Bricken
Which historical figure would be best suited to run a frontier AI lab?
- [33:07]
Dwarkesh Patel
This is definitely a Question for you guys.
- [33:08]
Sholta Douglas
Oh, no, I mean, I'm curious what your take is first. You've spoken to more of the heads of AI labs than I have.
- [33:15]
Dwarkesh Patel
I was going to say lbj. Sorry, is it question, who would be best at running an AI lab? Or who would be best for the world?
- [33:22]
Sholta Douglas
Or what outcome do you want?
- [33:25]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah, what outcome do you want?
- [33:26]
Dwarkesh Patel
Because I imagine it seems what the best AI lab CEO succeed at is raising money, building up hype, setting a coherent vision. I don't know how much it matters for the CEO themselves to have good research taste or something, but it seems like their role is more as a sort of emissary to the rest of the world. And I feel like LBJ would be pretty good at this. Like just getting the right concessions, making projects, move along, coordinating among different groups to maybe. Oh, Robert Moses.
- [34:00]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah.
- [34:01]
Dwarkesh Patel
Again, not necessarily best for the world, but just in terms of making shit happen.
- [34:04]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah, I mean, I think best for the world is a pretty important precondition.
- [34:07]
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, right. There's a Lord Ackwood quote of great people are very rarely good people. So it's hard to think of a great person in history who are like, I feel like they'd really move the ball forward. And also I trust their moral judgment.
- [34:21]
Trenton Bricken
We're lucky in many senses with the set today. That's right. The set of people today are both. They try and care a lot about the moral side as well as sort of drive the labs forward.
- [34:32]
Dwarkesh Patel
This is also why I'm skeptical of big grand schemes like nationalization or some public private partnership or just generally shaking up the landscape too much. Because I do think we're in one of the better. I mean, the sort of difficulty of whether it's alignment or whether it's some kind of deployment, safety risks, that is just like the nature of the universe is gonna make that some level of difficulty. But the human factors in a lot of the counterfactual universes, I feel like we don't end up with people. Like we could be in a universe where they don't even pay lip service. This is not an idea that anybody had that you could have an ASI takeover. I think to think we live in a pretty good counterfactual universe.
- [35:13]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah, we got a good set of gameplays on the board.
- [35:15]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right.
- [35:16]
Trenton Bricken
How are you preparing for fast timelines?
- [35:19]
Dwarkesh Patel
If there's fast timelines, then there will be this six month period in which the most important decisions in human history are being made. And I feel like having an AI podcast during that time. Might be useful. That's basically the plan.
- [35:35]
Sholta Douglas
Have you made any shorter term decisions with regards to spending or health or anything else?
- [35:43]
Dwarkesh Patel
After I interviewed Zuckerberg, my business bank balance was negative 23 cents. When the ad money hit, I immediately reinvested it in Nvidia. So that is the. Sorry, but you were asking from a sort of altruistic perspective.
- [36:00]
Sholta Douglas
No, just in general. Have you changed the way you live at all because of your AGI timelines?
- [36:06]
Dwarkesh Patel
I never looked into getting a Roth ira.
- [36:10]
Trenton Bricken
He brought us Fiji water before, which.
- [36:14]
Sholta Douglas
Is in plastic bottles.
- [36:15]
Trenton Bricken
Dorcas has changed.
- [36:18]
Dwarkesh Patel
Have you guys changed your lifestyle as a result?
- [36:21]
Trenton Bricken
Not really, no. I just work all the time.
- [36:25]
Dwarkesh Patel
But you were doing that anyways. Or would you not?
- [36:30]
Trenton Bricken
I would probably be going very intensely at whatever things I'd picked to devote myself to.
- [36:35]
Dwarkesh Patel
How about you?
- [36:36]
Sholta Douglas
I canceled my 401k contributions.
- [36:38]
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, really?
- [36:38]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah. That felt like a more serious one. It's hard for me to imagine a world in which I have all this money that's just sitting in this account and waiting till I'm 60 and things look so different then.
- [36:52]
Dwarkesh Patel
But you could be like a trillionaire with your marginal 401k contributions, I guess.
- [36:57]
Sholta Douglas
But you also can't invest it in. In specific things. And I don't know, I might change my mind in the future and can restart it. And I've been contributing for a few years now.
- [37:08]
Dwarkesh Patel
On a more serious note, one thing I have been thinking about is how could you use this money to an altruistic end? And basically, if there's somebody who's up and coming in the field that I know, which is making content, could I use money to support them? And I'm of two minds on this one. There are people who did this for me and it was kind of actually responsible for me continuing to do the podcast when it just like did not make sense as a. There were like a couple hundred people listening or something. Wanna shout out Anil Varanasi for doing this. And also Leopold actually for the foundation he was previously running. On the other hand, it's like I feel like I would. It's the thing about what that blogger was saying, that the good ones, you actually do notice. It's hard to find a hidden talent. Maybe I'm totally wrong about this, but I feel like if I put up a sort of grant application, I give you money if you're trying to make a blog. I'm actually not sure about how well that would work.
- [38:04]
Trenton Bricken
There's different things you could do though. There's. I'LL give you money to move to San Francisco for two months and sort of meet people and sort of get more context and taste and feedback on what you're doing. And it's not so much about the money or time. It's like it's putting them in an environment where they can more rapidly grow. That's something that one could do. I think you do that quite proactively in terms of you deliberately introduce people that you think will be interesting to each other and this kind of stuff.
- [38:31]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, no, I mean, that's very fair. And obviously I've benefited a ton from moving to San Francisco, and it's unlikely that I would be doing this podcast, at least on AI to the degree I am, if I wasn't here. So maybe it's a mistake to judge people based on the quality of their content as it exists now and just throw money at them. Not throw money, but give them enough money to move to SF to get caught up in this intellectual milieu and then maybe do something interesting as a result.
- [38:56]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah. The thing that most readily comes to mind is the MATS program for AI research. And this seems like it's just been incredibly successful at giving people the time, the funding, and the social status justification to do AI safety relevant research with mentors.
- [39:16]
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, and you have a similar program.
- [39:18]
Sholta Douglas
We have the Anthropic Fellows program.
- [39:19]
Dwarkesh Patel
And then what is your. I know you're probably selecting for a slightly different thing, but I assume it's going to be power law dominated. And have you noticed a pattern among the. Even if it's MAS fellows or your fellows who is just like this made the whole thing worth it?
- [39:34]
Sholta Douglas
What characteristic help? I mean, there have been multiple people who Anthropic and other labs have hired out of this program. So I think the return on investment for it has been massive. And yeah, apparently the fellows, I think there are, 20 of them, are really good.
- [39:47]
Dwarkesh Patel
What is the trick to making it work well or finding that one person?
- [39:49]
Sholta Douglas
I think it's gotten much better with time, where the early fellows, some of them did good work and got good jobs. And so then now, later fellows, the quality bar has just risen and risen and risen and there are even better mentors now than before. So it's this really cool flywheel effect. But originally it was just people who didn't have the funding or time to make a name for themselves or do ambitious work. So it was kind of like giving them that niche to do it.
- [40:20]
Dwarkesh Patel
Right, right, right.
- [40:21]
Sholta Douglas
Seems really key.
- [40:22]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- [40:22]
Trenton Bricken
You could do other things that doesn't have to be money. You could put out ideas for things you'd be really interested in reading.
- [40:28]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right.
- [40:29]
Trenton Bricken
Like promoting.
- [40:31]
Dwarkesh Patel
There's something coming there.
- [40:32]
Trenton Bricken
Okay, there we go.
- [40:33]
Dwarkesh Patel
This episode hopefully will launch Tuesday at the same time as the book, by the way, which you can get at Stripe Press Scaling, but on Wednesday, which is the day after. Hopefully there's something useful for you here.
- [40:45]
Trenton Bricken
Okay. Exciting.
- [40:46]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah.
- [40:47]
Trenton Bricken
Any other questions we want to ask?
- [40:50]
Dwarkesh Patel
The thing I have takes on which I rarely get asked about, is distribution.
- [40:55]
Sholta Douglas
Distribution of AI.
- [40:56]
Dwarkesh Patel
No, no, sorry, like MrBeastle distribution. Oh, yeah, yeah. Where people, I think, rightly focus on the content and if that's not up to snuff, I think you won't succeed. But to the extent that somebody is trying to do similar things, the thing they consistently underrate is putting the. Yeah. Putting the time into getting distribution. Right. I just take, like, random takes about. For example, the most successful thing for my podcast in terms of growth has been YouTube shorts. And it's a thing you would never have predicted beforehand. And, you know, they're like, responsible for like, basically at least half the growth of the podcast or something.
- [41:41]
Trenton Bricken
I mean, I buy that.
- [41:42]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- [41:43]
Trenton Bricken
Why wouldn't you have predicted it? Like, I mean, like. Yeah, I mean, I guess there's the contrast of, like, the long form, deep content and like YouTube shorts and stuff. But definitely I think they're good hooks to the content.
- [41:53]
Dwarkesh Patel
And I have takes on how to write tweets and stuff. The main intuition being write like you're writing to a group, chat to a group chat to your friends rather than this formal whatever. I don't know, just these sort of.
- [42:06]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah, no, I mean, what else comes to mind here?
- [42:08]
Trenton Bricken
Maybe it's interesting, the difference between TikTok and YouTube shorts.
- [42:11]
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, yeah, we've never cracked TikTok.
- [42:13]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah.
- [42:13]
Sholta Douglas
Why not? Like you've tried?
- [42:15]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. I mean, Fred, have you done everything? No, I have not.
- [42:19]
Trenton Bricken
If you've read these poems, maybe you're like in a bubble bath with like.
- [42:26]
Sholta Douglas
Some beard shampoo on reading poems.
- [42:29]
Trenton Bricken
That'd be an incredible. I bet you that would go viral. You have to do that now.
- [42:37]
Dwarkesh Patel
Reading a poem. Uncross yous Legs.
- [42:39]
Sholta Douglas
Last episode, it was the interpretability challenge. Now it's doordash and a bubble bath.
- [42:44]
Dwarkesh Patel
We gotta sell the book somehow, you.
- [42:46]
Sholta Douglas
Know, literally do it like Margot Robbie.
- [42:49]
Trenton Bricken
Exactly. Explaining the CD stuff. So what is scaly?
- [42:59]
Dwarkesh Patel
And that's how you crack distribution.
- [43:01]
Trenton Bricken
That's how you crack distribution.
- [43:06]
Sholta Douglas
But yeah, no, like when we did our episode, it launched and you were sharing interesting tidbits about how it was doing and the thumbnail you wanted to use and the title. And I think I even asked you to share more details because it seemed interesting and cool and subtle things, but it seemed like you also kind of just hated it. Like playing this game of really having to optimize all these knobs.
- [43:30]
Dwarkesh Patel
What I realized, I mean, talent is everything. So having. I'm really lucky to have three to four editors who I'm incredibly proud to work with. I don't know how to hire more of them. Like they're just so good and self directed. So honestly, I don't have the tips to how to correct that. I hired those guys. So one of them was a farmer in Argentina. One of them was a freshman master in Sri Lanka. One of them was a former editor for one of MrBeast's channels. The other is a director in Czechoslovakia who makes these AI animations that you've seen in the notes on China. And he's working on more essays like that. So I don't know how to replicate that catch again.
- [44:11]
Trenton Bricken
God, that's a pretty widely cuffed net. I'm gonna be honest. Damn.
- [44:14]
Dwarkesh Patel
But they're all like, God damn it.
- [44:16]
Sholta Douglas
And this was just through your challenges and just tweeting about.
- [44:19]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right. Yeah. So I had a competition to make clips of my podcast. I rounded up a couple of them this way. Yeah. It's hard to replicate because I've tried.
- [44:28]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah.
- [44:28]
Sholta Douglas
Why do you think this works so well with the video editors? Because you tried a similar approach with your chief of staff.
- [44:35]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. The difference is with the video editor, I think there is this arbitrage opportunity where there are people. It is fundamentally a sort of are you willing to work hard and obsess about getting better over time, which all of them go above and beyond on. But you can just find people in other countries who are like. And it's not even about the wages, like I've 10x their salaries or something like that. It's just about getting somebody who is really detail oriented and there is this global arbitrage there. Whereas with the general manager, by the way. So the person I ended up hiring and who I'm super excited to work with is your childhood best friend Max Hearns. Max is so great and he would have plenty of other opportunities. There's not this weird arbitrage where you find some farmer in Argentina.
- [45:22]
Sholta Douglas
But it is striking that you were looking for a while. When you mentioned offhand that Max was looking for something new.
- [45:30]
Dwarkesh Patel
I genuinely. This is going to be a total. A 12 year old learns about the world kind of question, but I genuinely don't know how big companies hire because I was trying to find this person for a year, and I'm really glad about the person I ended up hiring, but it was just like if I needed to hire 100 people for a company, let alone a thousand people, I just do not know how to find people like this at scale.
- [45:53]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah. I mean, I think this is the number one issue that startup CEOs have hiring. It's just relentlessly the number one.
- [46:00]
Dwarkesh Patel
And the thing I was stunned with is how it didn't seem like my platform helped that much. I got like close to a thousand applications across the different rounds of publicizing it that I did, and a lot of, I think, really cool people applied, but the person that I ended up hiring was somebody who was just a reference, you know, like a mutual friend kind of thing. And a couple of other top contenders were also this way. So it's weird. Like, the best people in the world don't want to apply at least to things like this, and you just got to seek them out. Even if you think you have a public platform or something.
- [46:33]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the job might just be so out of distribution from anything else that people would do.
- [46:39]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's right. Yeah.
- [46:44]
Sholta Douglas
How do you make it on substack as a newbie writer?
- [46:47]
Dwarkesh Patel
I think if you were starting from scratch, there's two useful hacks. One is podcasting, because you don't need to have some super original new take. You can just interview people who do and you can leverage their platform. And two is writing book reviews again because you have something to react to rather than having to come up with a unique worldview of your own. There's probably other things, and it's really hard to give advice in advance, just try things. But those I think are just like good, cold starts.
- [47:16]
Trenton Bricken
The book reviews is a good suggestion. I actually use Gwern's book reviews as a way to recommend books to people.
- [47:22]
Dwarkesh Patel
By the way, this is a totally undersupplied thing because I. If anybody has book reviews. Jason Furman is this economist who has like a thousand goodreads reviews, and I probably have visited his goodreads on a hundred independent visits.
- [47:35]
Trenton Bricken
Wow.
- [47:35]
Dwarkesh Patel
Same with the Gorn book reviews or something. Right? So book reviews are a sort of very undersupplied thing if you're looking to get started making some kind of content.
- [47:44]
Sholta Douglas
I like that.
- [47:45]
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- [47:45]
Trenton Bricken
Cool.
- [47:46]
Dwarkesh Patel
Thank you guys so much for doing this.
- [47:48]
Trenton Bricken
Yeah, this was fun.
- [47:49]
Dwarkesh Patel
We'll turn the tables on you again pretty soon.
- [47:51]
Trenton Bricken
But how does it feel being in the hot seat?
- [47:54]
Dwarkesh Patel
That's nice. Nobody ever asked me a question.
- [48:02]
Trenton Bricken
Nobody ever asked. How is Dual Cash?
- [48:08]
Dwarkesh Patel
Cool.
- [48:08]
Sholta Douglas
Yeah, yeah. Super excited for the book launch.
- [48:10]
Dwarkesh Patel
Thank you.
- [48:11]
Sholta Douglas
The website's awesome, by the way.
- [48:12]
Dwarkesh Patel
I appreciate it.
- [48:12]
Trenton Bricken
Oh, yeah, the ones that say yeah, yeah.
- [48:14]
Dwarkesh Patel
Strife Press, Scaling. Yeah.
- [48:19]
Trenton Bricken
Cool, Cool.
- [48:20]
Dwarkesh Patel
Thanks, guys.
- [48:20]
Trenton Bricken
See you later.
- [48:21]
Sholta Douglas
Thanks.
- [48:21]
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, I hope you enjoyed that episode. So, as we talked about, my new book is out. It's released with Stripe Press. It's called the Scaling Era and it compiles the main insights across these last few years of doing these AI interviews. And I'm super pleased with how it turned out. It really elevates the conversations and adds the necessary context and just seeing them all together even reminded me of many of the most interesting segments and insights that I had myself forgotten. So I hope you check it out. Go to the link in the description below to buy it separately. I have a clips channel now on YouTube. People keep complaining about the fact that I put clips and the main video on the same channel, so request granted. There is a new clips channel, but please do subscribe to it so we can get it kickstarted. And while you're at it, also make sure to subscribe to the main channel. Other than that, just honestly, the most helpful thing you can do is share the podcast. If you enjoyed it, just send it on Twitter, put put it in your group chats, share it with whoever else you think might enjoy it. That's the most helpful thing. If you want to learn more about advertising on future episodes, go to dwarkesh.com advertise okay, see you on the next one.