Summary
Dwarkesh Podcast: He hosts the Dwarkesh Podcast, where he conducts in-depth interviews with experts and thought leaders.
AI Focus: Patel is particularly known for his focus on artificial intelligence, exploring its various facets and potential implications.
OnAir Post: Dwarkesh Patel
News
In a world with over five million podcasts, Dwarkesh Patel stands out as an unexpected trailblazer. At just 23 years old, he has caught the attention of influential figures such as Jeff Bezos, Noah Smith, Nat Friedman, and Tyler Cowen, who have all praised his interviews — the latter describing Patel as “highly rated but still underrated!” Through his podcast, he has created a platform that draws in some of the most influential minds of our time, from tech moguls to AI pioneers.
But of all the noteworthy parts of Patel’s journey to acclaim, one thing stands out among the rest: just how deeply he will go on any given topic.
“If I do an AI interview where I’m interviewing Demis [Hassabis], CEO of DeepMind, I’ll probably have read most of DeepMind’s papers from the last couple of years. I’ve literally talked to a dozen AI researchers in preparation for that interview — just weeks and weeks of teaching myself about [everything].”
About
Overview Short
Extensive Research: He is known for his thorough preparation and deep understanding of the topics he discusses, earning praise from guests like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
Interviews: He has interviewed a wide range of people, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, and Marc Andreessen.
AI Tools for Learning: Patel uses AI tools like Claude to enhance his learning and research processes.
Recognition: He was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024.
Source: Google AI Overview
Contact
Email: Podcast
Videos
AMA ft. Sholto & Trenton: New Book, Career Advice Given AGI, How I’d Start From Scratch
March 25, 2025 (49:33)
By: Patel YouTube
I recorded an AMA! I had a blast shooting the shit with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas.
We discussed my new book, career advice given AGI, how I pick guests, how I research for the show, and some other nonsense.
My book, “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025” is available in digital format now. https://press.stripe.com/scaling
Timestamps:
(0:00:00) – Book launch announcement
(0:04:57) – AI models not making connections across fields
(0:10:52) – Career advice given AGI
(0:15:20) – Guest selection criteria
(0:17:19) – Choosing to pursue the podcast long-term
(0:25:12) – Reading habits
(0:31:10) – Beard deepdive
(0:33:02) – Who is best suited for running an AI lab? (
0:35:16) – Preparing for fast AGI timelines
(0:40:50) – Growing the podcast
I recorded an AMA! I had a blast shooting the shit with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. We discussed my new book, career advice given AGI, how I pick guests, how I research for the show, and some other nonsense. My book, “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025” is available in digital format now. https://press.stripe.com/scaling Timestamps: (0:00:00) – Book launch announcement (0:04:57) – AI models not making connections across fields (0:10:52) – Career advice given AGI (0:15:20) – Guest selection criteria (0:17:19) – Choosing to pursue the podcast long-term (0:25:12) – Reading habits (0:31:10) – Beard deepdive (0:33:02) – Who is best suited for running an AI lab? ( 0:35:16) – Preparing for fast AGI timelines (0:40:50) – Growing the podcast
February 19, 2025 (01:16:00)
By: Patel YouTube
Satya Nadella on:
- Why he doesn’t believe in AGI but does believe in 10% economic growth,
- Microsoft’s new topological qubit breakthrough and gaming world models,
- Whether Office commoditizes LLMs or the other way around,
Read the transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/satya-nadella
Books
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025
Source: Amazon
An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen.
How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?
In a series of in-depth interviews with leading AI researchers and company founders—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Patel provides the first comprehensive and contemporary portrait of the technology that is transforming our world.
Essays on Substack
What fully automated firms will look like
Source: Dwarkesh Podcast
Everyone is sleeping on the *collective* advantages AIs will have, which have nothing to do with raw IQ: they can be copied, distilled, merged, scaled, and evolved in ways humans simply can’t.
Internal planning can be much more efficient than market competition in the short run, but it needs to be constrained by some slower but unbiased outer feedback loop. A company that grows too large risks having its internal optimization diverge from market realities.
That said, the balance may shift as AI systems improve. As corporations become more “software-like” – with perfect replication of successful components and faster feedback loops – we may see much larger and more efficient firms than were previously possible.
The market continues to serve as the grounding outer loop. How does the firm convert trillions of tokens of data from customers, markets, news, etc every day into future plans, new products, and the like? Does the board make all the decisions politburo-style and use $10 billion dollars of inference to run Monte Carlo tree search on different one-year plans? Or do you run some kind of evolutionary process on different departments, giving them more capital, and compute/labor based on their performance?
