Liron Shapira is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and CEO of counseling startup Relationship Hero. He’s also a rationalist, advisor for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and Center for Applied Rationality, and a consistently candid AI doom pointer-outer.

TJP LINKS:

CHAPTERS:

Dwarkesh Patel is the host of the Dwarkesh Podcast, where he interviews intellectuals, scientists, historians, economists, and founders about their big ideas. He does deep research and asks great questions. Past podcast guests include billionaire entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen, economist and polymath Tyler Cowen, and OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Dwarkesh has been recommended by Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham, and me.

PODCAST LINKS:

CHAPTERS:

Intro (0:00)

OpenAI drama (0:50)

Learning methods (4:10)

Growing the podcast (7:38)

Improving the podcast (17:03)

Contra Marc Andreessen on AI risk (24:18)

How will AI affect podcasts? (26:31)

AI alignment (32:08)

Dwarkesh’s guests (38:04)

Is Eliezer Yudkowsky right? (41:58)

More on the Dwarkesh Podcast (46:01)

Other great podcasts (50:06)

Nanobots, foom, and doom (56:01)

Great Twitter poasters (1:01:59)

Rationalism and other factions (1:05:44)

Why hasn’t Marxism died? (1:15:27)

Where to allocate talent (1:18:51)

Sam Bankman-Fried (1:22:22)

Why is Elon Musk so successful? (1:29:07)

How relevant is human talent with AGI soon? (1:35:07)

Is government actually broken? (1:36:35)

How should we fix Congress? (1:40:50)

Dwarkesh’s favorite part of podcasting (1:46:46)

Scott Aaronson is the Schlumberger Chair of Computer Science and Director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he got his bachelor’s in CS from Cornell, his PhD in complexity theory at UC Berkeley, held postdocs at Princeton and Waterloo, and taught at MIT. Currently, he’s on leave to work on OpenAI’s Superalignment team.

PODCAST LINKS:

CHAPTERS:

Intro (0:00)

Background (0:59)

What Quantum Computers Can Do (16:07)

P=NP (21:57)

Complexity Theory (28:07)

David Deutsch (33:49)

AI Watermarking and CAPTCHAs (44:15)

Alignment By Default (56:41)

Cryptography in AI (1:02:12)

OpenAI Superalignment (1:10:29)

Twitter (1:20:27)

Rationalism (1:24:50)

Nora Belrose is the Head of Interpretability at EleutherAI, and a noted AI optimist.

PODCAST LINKS:

CHAPTERS:

Intro (0:00)

EleutherAI (0:32)

Optimism (8:02)

Linguistics (22:27)

What Should AIs Do? (32:01)

Regulation (43:44)

Future Vibes (53:56)

Anthropic Polysemanticity (1:05:05)

More Interpretability (1:19:52)

Eliciting Latent Knowledge (1:44:44)

Razib Khan is a geneticist, the CXO and CSO of a biotech startup, and a writer and podcaster with interests in genetics, genomics, evolution, history, and politics.

PODCAST LINKS:

CHAPTERS:

Intro (0:00)

Genrait (0:37)

Genetics and Memetics (4:31)

Domestication (13:48)

Ancient History (22:48)

TESCREALism (30:02)

Transhumanism (53:05)

IQ (1:02:26)

Quintin Pope is a machine learning researcher focusing on natural language modeling and AI alignment. Among alignment researchers, Quintin stands out for his optimism. He believes that AI alignment is far more tractable than it seems, and that we appear to be on a good path to making the future great. On LessWrong, he's written one of the most popular posts of the last year, “My Objections To ‘We're All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky’”, as well as many other highly upvoted posts on various alignment papers, and on his own theory of alignment, shard theory.

PODCAST LINKS:

CHAPTERS:

Introduction (0:00)

What Is AGI? (1:03)

What Can AGI Do? (12:49)

Orthogonality (23:14)

Mind Space (42:50)

Quintin’s Background and Optimism (55:06)

Mesa-Optimization and Reward Hacking (1:02:48)

Deceptive Alignment (1:11:52)

Shard Theory (1:24:10)

What Is Alignment? (1:30:05)

Misalignment and Evolution (1:37:21)

Mesa-Optimization and Reward Hacking, Part 2 (1:46:56)

RL Agents (1:55:02)

Monitoring AIs (2:09:29)

Mechanistic Interpretability (2:14:00)

AI Disempowering Humanity (2:28:13)

Rohit Krishnan is a venture capitalist, economist, engineer, former hedge fund manager, and essayist. On Twitter @krishnanrohit, and on his Substack, Strange Loop Canon, at strangeloopcanon.com, he writes about AI, business, investing, complex systems, and more.

CHAPTERS:

Intro (0:00)

Comparing Countries (0:33)

Reading (6:50)

Developing Genius (12:36)

Investing (24:08)

Contra AI Doom (34:27)

The Future of AI (46:26)

Video Transcript: https://www.theojaffee.com/p/4-rohit-krishnan

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1IJRtB8FP4Cnq8lWuuCdvW?si=eba62a72e6234efb

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theo-jaffee-podcast/id1699912677

RSS: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/989123/s/75569/private/129f6344-c459-4581-a9da-dc331677c2f6.rss

Playlist of all episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVN8-zhbMh9YnOGVRT9m0xzqTNGD_sujj

SOCIALS:

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/theojaffee

My Substack: https://www.theojaffee.com

Rohit’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/krishnanrohit

Strange Loop Canon: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com

Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering player who is a Pro Tour and Grand Prix winner, and member of the MTG Hall of Fame. He’s also been a professional trader and market maker, and a startup founder. He’s been involved in the rationalist movement for many years, and today, he writes about AI, rationality, game design and theory, philosophy, and more on his blog, Don’t Worry About the Vase.

PODCAST LINKS:

Video Transcript: https://www.theojaffee.com/p/3-zvi-mowshowitz

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1IJRtB8FP4Cnq8lWuuCdvW?si=eba62a72e6234efb

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theo-jaffee-podcast/id1699912677

RSS: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/989123/s/75569/private/129f6344-c459-4581-a9da-dc331677c2f6.rss

Playlist of all episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVN8-zhbMh9YnOGVRT9m0xzqTNGD_sujj

SOCIALS:

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/theojaffee

My Substack: https://www.theojaffee.com

Zvi’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/thezvi

Zvi’s Blog: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/

Zvi’s Substack: https://thezvi.substack.com/

Balsa Research: https://balsaresearch.com/

CHAPTERS:

Intro (0:00)

Zvi’s Background (0:42)

Rationalism (6:28)

Critiques of Rationalism (20:08)

The Pill Poll (39:26)

Balsa Research (47:58)

p(doom | AGI) (1:05:47)

Alignment (1:17:18)

Decentralization and the Cold War (1:39:42)

More on AI (1:53:53)

Dealing with AI Risks (2:07:40)

Writing (2:18:57)

Carlos de la Guardia is an independent AGI researcher inspired by the work of Karl Popper, David Deutsch, and Richard Dawkins. In his research, he seeks answers to some of humanity’s biggest questions: how humans create knowledge, how AIs can one day do the same, and how we can use knowledge to figure out how to speed up our minds and even end death. Carlos is currently working on a book about AGI, which will be published on his Substack, Making Minds and Making Progress.

Video Transcript: https://www.theojaffee.com/p/2-carlos-de-la-guardia

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1IJRtB8FP4Cnq8lWuuCdvW?si=eba62a72e6234efb

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theo-jaffee-podcast/id1699912677

RSS: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/989123/s/75569/private/129f6344-c459-4581-a9da-dc331677c2f6.rss

Playlist of all episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVN8-zhbMh9YnOGVRT9m0xzqTNGD_sujj

SOCIALS:

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/theojaffee

My Substack: https://www.theojaffee.com

Carlos’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dela3499

Carlos's Substack: https://carlosd.substack.com/

Carlos's Website: https://carlosd.org/

CHAPTERS:

Intro (0:00)

Carlos’ Research (0:55)

Economics and Computation (19:46)

Bayesianism (27:54)

AI Doom and Optimism (34:21)

Will More Compute Produce AGI? (46:04)

AI Alignment and Interpretability (54:11)

Mind Uploading (1:05:44)

Carlos’ 6 Questions on AGI (1:12:47)

1. What are the limits of biological evolution? (1:13:06)

2. What makes explanatory knowledge special? (1:18:07)

3. How can Popperian epistemology improve AI? (1:19:54)

4. What are the different kinds of idea conflicts? (1:23:58)

5. Why is the brain a network of neurons? (1:25:47)

6. How do neurons make consciousness? (1:27:26)

The Optimistic AI Future (1:34:50)

Greg Fodor is a software engineer who’s been involved in augmented and virtual reality for over a decade. He co-founded Altspace VR, a virtual events company acquired by Microsoft, worked on Mozilla Hubs, a browser-based VR community platform; built Jel, a virtual environment video game for working, and is currently working on a new extended reality hardware stealth startup. On his Twitter account, @gfodor, he tweets about AI, VR and AR, unidentified aerial phenomena, aliens, and the philosophy of knowledge.