I originally titled my podcast The Lunar Society. I changed it to Dwarkesh Podcast eventually because people kept thinking it was a crypto podcast (”to the moon!!!”). I named it after The Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club that met in the late 18th century. Members included James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, and Josiah Wedgwood. These were the scientists, inventors, and philosophers who had made first contact with the Industrial Revolution which was just starting to take shape around them. And they discussed everything from steam engines to abolition to chemistry to education reform.
Someday people will look back on this period the way we look back on the Enlightenment. Great thinkers having important debates right as the world was about to undergo these massive technological, economic, and political revolutions. And some of these thinkers actually managed to get a couple of the big things right.
Whatever happens next, I want the debates to have happened on this podcast, and to have happened well.
I wanna make essays a first class citizen of what I do. This is for a couple of reasons:
Interviews are best when I have some take that I can bounce against my guest. You only get to see Federer’s skill when he’s rallying against a decent player, and certainly not if he’s just bouncing the ball against a wall.
As AI becomes more and more closed off, the best people will not be in a position where they can explain their thinking clearly. This is why the Karpathy episode was so incredible. It’s rare to get an industry expert without any particular thing to pitch, and who can talk openly about the research. But I’m not aware of anyone else who is Karpathy-tier, and who is not obliged to keep his or her mouth shut about a couple of things.
My essays have done much better than my expectations, in terms of reach, correctness and impact. I wrote the continual learning essay on a whim one afternoon, because I wanted to articulate why all these LLM scripts I’ve written for my business haven’t been helpful. And I’m still a little shocked to realize that I had stumbled upon (at least part of) what Ilya is working on at SSI. It’s not a crazy insight by any means, but it’s notable that you can just think about stuff, and there’s a good chance you’ll figure out what’s up. Btw, after I released the essay, both Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis have said that continual learning is a major bottleneck on the path to AGI. Of course, there’s no way to know whether they read my essay. But honestly, even if they hadn’t, I’d still be pretty stoked if I had independently pointed my finger at the exact same bottleneck as these guys, despite all their additional context.
Which brings to my next point. I feel like there’s actually not that many secrets. The researchers and CEOs of the AI labs are a couple months ahead of you. This just doesn’t amount to any substantial secret knowledge that, if only you knew, you’d also have 2027 timelines. A ton of progress has been made in the last 3 years since ChatGPT, but none of it was super shocking based on the rumor mill and some connecting of the dots. And then there’s the big picture questions about AI’s impacts, where your thinking might very plausibly be much better than people at the labs, just because it takes time to think, and these people are busy running a damn company.
Some of the questions I’m most interested in simply can’t be answered extemporaneously by any human being on the planet. They require knowledge across multiple different fields, and couple hours (to days) of crunching the numbers or thinking through shit.
Because often enough my guests can’t just answer pretty complicated fractal questions in a satisfying way on the spot, I get frustrated with the whole enterprise. The main angst I’ve kept receding back to over and over is, “Okay what did I actually learn from this interview? And if I didn’t get that much concrete insight and understanding out of it, despite a week+ of research and hours of conversation, what hope is there for the audience? And if no one learned anything, what the fuck are we doing here?” I feel much essays survive this cynicism much better. For example, I’m often frustrated that social scientists won’t speculate with me about what their insights imply about AI civilization, or historians about how history might have turned out differently given different counterfactuals. But it’s ridiculous to count on a scholar who is thinking about AGI for first time in his life to start shooting off some galaxy brain implications from his theory. But I can go read their books, and use my understanding of the technology to come up with some hot takes.
I can easily co-release my essays as narrations on my podcast and YouTube feed, so actually the essays are super complementary to this audio/video audience I’ve built up.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving: a lottery winner who then won another lottery is less lucky than I am.
Every once in a while, I’ll be grabbing dinner with a writer whose work I was obsessed with in college. And a part of me is just like, “What the fuck is happening right now?” Many of my greatest intellectual heroes are now my direct friends and teachers. My job is to spend a week learning about whatever I’m most interested in, and then talk to the world expert on that topic. A job I would pay to do has rewarded me - intellectually, financially, socially - beyond my wildest expectations. And there’s millions of people who are into this stuff! This audience contains some of the smartest people in the world, including many of the people I am a huge fan of. Then there’s my team. It’s unreal how talented, agentic, tasteful, and detail-oriented my colleagues are. I genuinely have no idea how I convinced people this good to come run a podcast.