Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up
New blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and th...
Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
Eric Jang walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools. Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward....
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
David Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natu...
Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served
Did a very different format with Reiner Pope - a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served. It’s shocking ho...
Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat
I asked Jensen about TPU competition, Nvidia’s lock on the ever more bottlenecked supply chain needed to make advanced chips, whether we should be sel...
Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses
Really enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress. It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loo...
Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion. People sometimes say t...
Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute
Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, provides a deep dive into the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute: logic, memory, and power. And walks thro...
The most important question nobody's asking about AI
Read the full essay here: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic Timestamps (00:00:00) - Anthropic vs The Pentagon (00:04:16) - The overhangs of ...
Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer b...