Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet.  We discuss: * why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make more technological progress * why he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermism * why there aren’t any successful slave revolts * how geoengineering can help us solve climate change * why Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Trade * and much much more! Timestamps (0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities (0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires (0:03:28) -Slave Revolts (0:08:43) -Slavery Ban (0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids (0:18:13) - Teotihuacan (0:20:02) - New Book Thesis (0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley (0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World (0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization (0:43:24) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories (0:48:29) - Virginia Company + Hubris (0:52:48) - China’s Silver Trade (1:02:27) - Wizards vs. Prophets (1:07:19) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays (1:11:50) -Geoengineering (1:16:15) -Finding New Wizards (1:18:10) -Agroforestry is Underrated (1:27:00) -Longtermism & Free Markets 

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Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry

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Chatted with John Schulman (cofounded OpenAI and led ChatGPT creation) on how posttraining tames the shoggoth, and the nature of the progress to come... 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) - Pre-training, post-training, and future capabilities (00:16:57) - Plan for AGI 2025 (00:29:19) - Teaching models to reason (00:40:50) - The Road to ChatGPT (00:52:13) - What makes for a good RL researcher? (01:00:58) - Keeping humans in the loop (01:15:15) - State of research, plateaus, and moats Sponsors If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, fill out this form. * Your DNA shapes everything about you. Want to know how? Take 10% off our Premium DNA kit with code DWARKESH at mynucleus.com. * CommandBar is an AI user assistant that any software product can embed to non-annoyingly assist, support, and unleash their users. Used by forward-thinking CX, product, growth, and marketing teams. Learn more at commandbar.com. 

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John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) - Reasoning, RLHF, & Plan for 2027 AGI

Mark Zuckerberg on: - Llama 3 - open sourcing towards AGI - custom silicon, synthetic data, & energy constraints on scaling - Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much more Enjoy! Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Human edited transcript with helpful links here. Timestamps (00:00:00) - Llama 3 (00:08:32) - Coding on path to AGI (00:25:24) - Energy bottlenecks (00:33:20) - Is AI the most important technology ever? (00:37:21) - Dangers of open source (00:53:57) - Caesar Augustus and metaverse (01:04:53) - Open sourcing the $10b model & custom silicon (01:15:19) - Zuck as CEO of Google+ Sponsors If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, fill out this form. * This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue. Learn more at stripe.com. * V7 Go is a tool to automate multimodal tasks using GenAI, reliably and at scale. Use code DWARKESH20 for 20% off on the pro plan. Learn more here. * CommandBar is an AI user assistant that any software product can embed to non-annoyingly assist, support, and unleash their users. Used by forward-thinking CX, product, growth, and marketing teams. Learn more at commandbar.com. 

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Mark Zuckerberg - Llama 3, Open Sourcing $10b Models, & Caesar Augustus

Had so much fun chatting with my good friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas on the podcast. No way to summarize it, except:  This is the best context dump out there on how LLMs are trained, what capabilities they're likely to soon have, and what exactly is going on inside them. You would be shocked how much of what I know about this field, I've learned just from talking with them. To the extent that you've enjoyed my other AI interviews, now you know why. So excited to put this out. Enjoy! I certainly did :) Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.  There's a transcript with links to all the papers the boys were throwing down - may help you follow along. Follow Trenton and Sholto on Twitter. Timestamps (00:00:00) - Long contexts (00:16:12) - Intelligence is just associations (00:32:35) - Intelligence explosion & great researchers (01:06:52) - Superposition & secret communication (01:22:34) - Agents & true reasoning (01:34:40) - How Sholto & Trenton got into AI research (02:07:16) - Are feature spaces the wrong way to think about intelligence? (02:21:12) - Will interp actually work on superhuman models (02:45:05) - Sholto’s technical challenge for the audience (03:03:57) - Rapid fire 

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Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken - How to Build & Understand GPT-7's Mind

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 

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Demis Hassabis - Scaling, Superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, Rogue Nations Threat

We discuss: * what it takes to process $1 trillion/year * how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships * what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is quite an open ended prompt, and the Collison brothers are just getting started). Plus the amazing stuff they're doing at Arc Institute, the financial infrastructure for AI agents, playing devil's advocate against progress studies, and much more. 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) - Advice for 20-30 year olds (00:12:12) - Progress studies (00:22:21) - Arc Institute (00:34:27) - AI & Fast Grants (00:43:46) - Stripe history (00:55:44) - Stripe Climate (01:01:39) - Beauty & APIs (01:11:51) - Financial innards (01:28:16) - Stripe culture & future (01:41:56) - Virtues of big businesses (01:51:41) - John 

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Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry

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