Podcast Episodes

Adam Marblestone – AI is missing something fundamental about the brain

Adam Marblestone has worked on brain-computer interfaces, quantum computing, formal mathematics, nanotech, and AI research. And he thinks AI is missing something fundamental about the brain.

Why are h…

Published on 6 hours ago

An audio version of my blog post, Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

Read the essay here.

Timestamps

00:00:00 What are we scaling?

00:03:11 The value of human labor

00:05:04 Economic diffusion lag is cope00:06:34 Goal-post shifting is justified

00:08:23 RL scaling

00:09:18 …

Published on 1 week ago

Sarah Paine – Why Russia Lost the Cold War

This is the final episode of the Sarah Paine lecture series, and it’s probably my favorite one. Sarah gives a “tour of the arguments” on what ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse, diving int…

Published on 1 week, 4 days ago

Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well.

Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

Sponsors

* Gemini…

Published on 1 month ago

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI

As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and me an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter.

Microsoft is building multiple Fairwaters,…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

Sarah Paine – How Russia sabotaged China's rise

In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for over a century.

This lecture was particularly intere…

Published on 1 month, 4 weeks ago

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

The Andrej Karpathy episode.

During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will just blend into the previous ~2.5 centuries…

Published on 2 months, 1 week ago

Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

Nick Lane has some pretty wild ideas about the evolution of life.

He thinks early life was continuous with the spontaneous chemistry of undersea hydrothermal vents.

Nick’s story may be wrong, but I fin…

Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago

Some thoughts on the Sutton interview

I have a much better understanding of Sutton’s perspective now. I wanted to reflect on it a bit.

(00:00:00) - The steelman

(00:02:42) - TLDR of my current thoughts

(00:03:22) - Imitation learning is con…

Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end.

After interviewing him, my steel man of Ric…

Published on 3 months ago