Dwarkesh Podcast

In terms of the depth and range of topics, this episode is the best I’ve done.

No part of my worldview is the same after talking with Carl Shulman. He's the most interesting intellectual you've never heard of.

We ended up talking for 8 hours, so I'm splitting this episode into 2 parts.

This part is about Carl’s model of an intelligence explosion, which integrates everything from:

how fast algorithmic progress & hardware improvements in AI are happening,

what primate evolution suggests about the scaling hypothesis,

how soon before AIs could do large parts of AI research themselves, and whether there would be faster and faster doublings of AI researchers,

how quickly robots produced from existing factories could take over the economy.

We also discuss the odds of a takeover based on whether the AI is aligned before the intelligence explosion happens, and Carl explains why he’s more optimistic than Eliezer.

The next part, which I’ll release next week, is about all the specific mechanisms of an AI takeover, plus a whole bunch of other galaxy brain stuff.

Maybe 3 people in the world have thought as rigorously as Carl about so many interesting topics. This was a huge pleasure.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:01:32) - Intelligence Explosion

(00:18:03) - Can AIs do AI research?

(00:39:00) - Primate evolution

(01:03:30) - Forecasting AI progress

(01:34:20) - After human-level AGI

(02:08:39) - AI takeover scenarios

I went over to the OpenAI offices in San Fransisco to ask the Chief Scientist and cofounder of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, about:

time to AGI

leaks and spies

what's after generative models

post AGI futures

working with Microsoft and competing with Google

difficulty of aligning superhuman AI

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

(00:00) - Time to AGI

(05:57) - What’s after generative models?

(10:57) - Data, models, and research

(15:27) - Alignment

(20:53) - Post AGI Future

(26:56) - New ideas are overrated

(36:22) - Is progress inevitable?

(41:27) - Future Breakthroughs

Here is my episode with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind

We discuss:

Why scaling is an artform

Adding search, planning, & AlphaZero type training atop LLMs

Making sure rogue nations can't steal weights

The right way to align superhuman AIs and do an intelligence explosion

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.

Timestamps

(0:00:00) - Nature of intelligence

(0:05:56) - RL atop LLMs

(0:16:31) - Scaling and alignment

(0:24:13) - Timelines and intelligence explosion

(0:28:42) - Gemini training

(0:35:30) - Governance of superhuman AIs

(0:40:42) - Safety, open source, and security of weights

(0:47:00) - Multimodal and further progress

(0:54:18) - Inside Google DeepMind

For 4 hours, I tried to come up reasons for why AI might not kill us all, and Eliezer Yudkowsky explained why I was wrong.

We also discuss his call to halt AI, why LLMs make alignment harder, what it would take to save humanity, his millions of words of sci-fi, and much more.

If you want to get to the crux of the conversation, fast forward to 2:35:00 through 3:43:54. Here we go through and debate the main reasons I still think doom is unlikely.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

(0:00:00) - TIME article

(0:09:06) - Are humans aligned?

(0:37:35) - Large language models

(1:07:15) - Can AIs help with alignment?

(1:30:17) - Society’s response to AI

(1:44:42) - Predictions (or lack thereof)

(1:56:55) - Being Eliezer

(2:13:06) - Othogonality

(2:35:00) - Could alignment be easier than we think?

(3:02:15) - What will AIs want?

(3:43:54) - Writing fiction & whether rationality helps you win

Here is my conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.

Dario is hilarious and has fascinating takes on what these models are doing, why they scale so well, and what it will take to align them.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Introduction

(00:01:00) - Scaling

(00:15:46) - Language

(00:22:58) - Economic Usefulness

(00:38:05) - Bioterrorism

(00:43:35) - Cybersecurity

(00:47:19) - Alignment & mechanistic interpretability

(00:57:43) - Does alignment research require scale?

(01:05:30) - Misuse vs misalignment

(01:09:06) - What if AI goes well?

(01:11:05) - China

(01:15:11) - How to think about alignment

(01:31:31) - Is modern security good enough?

(01:36:09) - Inefficiencies in training

(01:45:53) - Anthropic’s Long Term Benefit Trust

(01:51:18) - Is Claude conscious?

(01:56:14) - Keeping a low profile