Discussion

Dwarkesh Podcast

ekjhgkejhgk: I like Dwarkesh's style better than Lex Fridman, because unlike Fridman he's not a propagandist for Russia and doesn't have that "love" bullshit vibe.But on the substance they're equally vapid. Dwarkesh's interview with Richard Sutton was especially cringe.

scoopdewoop: Dwarkesh was ready to whitewash Elon the day after his Epstein emails came out. None of them should be taken seriously.

armitron: Dwarkesh is your run-of-the-mill vapid influencer idiot. Fridman on the other hand, when in the presence of greatness, knows to STFU and listen.

Upvoter33: “The presence of greatness” - ugh.

epgui: I really hate how people think LLMs == AI. An LLM can’t/shouldn’t be doing anything other than generating text.

zer00eyz: > But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs.I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The whole open AI -> Anthropic saga just reeks of the same evolution of Viant/Scient.Look we have an amazing tool, but it has some fundamental shortcomings that the industry seems to want to burry its head in the sand about. The moment the hype dies and we get to engineering and practical implementations a lot is going to change. Does it have the potential to displace a lot of our current industry: why yes it does. Agents can force the web open (have you ever tried to get all your amazon purchase history?) can kill dark patterns (go cancel this service for me), and crush wedge services (how many things are shimmed into sales force that should really be stand alone apps). And the valuable engagement is going to be by PEOPLE, good UI, good user experiences are gonna be what sells (this will hit internet advertising hard for the middle men like google and Facebook).

ekjhgkejhgk: Link please!

scoopdewoop: The day after the emails came out he posted a video where they had beers while Elon LARPed as a human

ekjhgkejhgk: Link please!

naves: Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA

alecco: But the "Anthropic fight" is mostly fake. Palantir was using Claude as base model. Anthropic allegedly took issue with unsupervised kills because the technology wasn't ready (or something along the lines).Also, I remember reading this guy has close ties to Anthropic. Also, I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere. Like Big Tech and the establishment are propping podcasts of controlled narrative/opposition. I don't buy any of it.

rustyhancock: Also Anthropic has made very clear they align closely with the DoW.Really Anthropic doesn't seem to be fighting for anyone but a narrow subset of people.So who cares, none of the but AI providers are particularly ethical. Pick your poison as your conscious and needs allow.

dwoldrich: Private AI's and searchable personal data troves are the only way to go if you care about privacy.I speculate we'll discover there's very few unambiguously ethical uses of AI, much less for military applications. Them's the breaks.

Trasmatta: This is pedantic. AI has many definitions. There was "AI" powering enemies in 80s and 90s video games

ang_cire: The author is naive.> The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves. We don’t want the winner of the AI race to be a government which operates on the principle that there is no such thing as a truly private company or a private citizen.In the US currently, there are private citizens, and there are 'not-the-1%' citizens, where a Kavanaugh stop is legal, your voter information may be (or may have already been) seized by the DoJ or FBI, you may be tracked by out of state or federal agents on ALPRs with no warrant, for any reason, and where attending a legal protest may have your biometrics added to a database of potential domestic terrorists.Or maybe your tax money will just be used to blow up unidentified boaters or bomb girls' schools and homes, and you'll get no say in whether that's the case because the elected body that is there to issue a declaration of war (or not) as representatives of you, has abdicated that power to a cabinet of unelected white nationalists.But go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness.

JumpCrisscross: > go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodnessBetter than China as a global model? Still, yes, probably. Potentially. Depends on how the next few years ago.

awesome_dude: I think that when some people talk about "AI" they have "AGI" in mind, and when others talk about "AI" they have "latest computer does the smarts" in mind.I personally would prefer "AI" to be "AGI" but there's no point fighting the way people use language (see: every damned pedantic comment about English usage ever!! :-)

ceroxylon: I think a lot of Dwarkesh's mentality about AI being inevitable / ubiquitous comes from the same part of him that thinks that artificial things are "good enough", e.g. the way he allows his production team to use fake plastic plants on set. Is he correct? I'm not sure, but I know there are at least a few people who notice the difference.

M00nF1sh: Is Trump really not a dictator? Meanwhile, China has been focusing on domestic development and investing in underdeveloped regions, including across Africa. China hasn't bombed girls' schools and then blamed it on the host country

conradev: I love that you are allowed to go off about how we are a worse country without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that. You are using your rights properly!

margalabargala: Add to that all the military posturing over Taiwan and it's clear that it's not "China doesn't do what the US does", it's "China hasn't done it...yet."The idea that anyone would be better off with China supplanting the US is asinine. This is the same government that committed the Tiananmen square massacre and still doesn't acknowledge that anything happened.

JumpCrisscross: > it's "China hasn't done it...yet.”China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1959. To the degree we had a classical definition of intent-based genocide, Beijing continues to commit it in Tibet and Xinjiang.America’s conscious is stained. But it’s downright nonsense to go off about surveillance when the comparison is China.

throwa356262: I have been told the Fridmans association with MIT is mostly a lie.Not sure if this is true, maybe someone who went to MIT around the same time can shed some light on this?

kleebeesh: I'm a random dude on the Internet, but my partner completed her PhD at MIT. While there I knew and knew of a few PhD grads who worked at MIT in some non-tenure-track role (postdoc, staff researcher, etc). Typically for a couple years and then they get a better-paying or more permanent job. But several remained "affiliated" in some way. They kept their MIT website/email, some in academia continued to collaborate to some extent. Things like that. But AFAIK they weren't getting a paycheck from MIT. And it's somewhere between neat and genuinely professionally valuable to be affiliated w/ a prestigious university, so I don't blame them for claiming affiliation. My best guess is he's "affiliated" in a similar way.

JumpCrisscross: > Is Trump really not a dictator?No. There is no court in Beijing that can tell Xi to knock it off.> China hasn't bombed girls' schoolsRead up on the treatment of Uyghur girls in the Chinese schools. It’s Indian Removal Act stuff, except right now.Again, nobody is arguing America is a beacon of anything right now. But between America and China, one is an explicit and proud autocracy.

recursive: What's the difference between a court whose orders you can ignore and a court that doesn't exist? Sounds like a question for the philosophers.

lovich: I’m surveilled across pretty much every aspect of my life between basic Snowden level scooping of my data and public tracking like flock cameras. Democracy is increasingly becoming a joke as the richest in our society explicitly are trying to break it and we look more and more like mid 90s Russia.I want the US to win because I live in the US and it will probably benefit me, but we’ve largely stopped pretending to value the republic so I don’t think we can claim a moral standing on these topics anymore.To reference your other comment, the common American man has as the de facto ability to sue our government and/or leaders as the common Chinese man

BoredPositron: A republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore.

JumpCrisscross: > republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymoreAn observation one can make when comparing a republic with the rule of law to one that ain’t, whether across time or geography. There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.

BoredPositron: Is there actually a benefit? Or are we just watching the slow motion collapse of another empire convinced of its own immortality? History is a graveyard of experiments that thought they were the exception to the rule.

ang_cire: I don't see anyone arguing that we'd be better off with China, but I am arguing that neither the US or China can be trusted with this, so the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is bad.

JumpCrisscross: > the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is badMy read is they’re saying we need an alternative to Chinese AI. Because with its industrial might, the default future is Chinese technological dominance.

albelfio: What the governments have done is different from what the cultural values of the two countries are. Chinese values and American values are different, and people can argue for one or the other. We, westerner, want our values to prevail. Dwarkesh wants to preserve our values of freedom.

Readerium: Yes he is room-mates with.

cushychicken: Love the interviews Dwarkesh sponsored with Sarah Paine from the Naval War College.Also, somewhat spitefully, find it funny that he has multiple roommates.

alecco: Those ones were a bit on the nose, no?

ks2048: People who buy the USA-vs-China race to a specific goal - do they really believe if China gets "AGI" first, they will immediately try to conquer the USA? How exactly will that go?

ang_cire: The real lie here is that there's an ethical superpower.Just like being a billionaire (or, super-wealther, if you will), you don't get to be a superpower by doing good things.China and the US can both be bad, and they're both going to use AI for mass internal and external surveillance and weapon targeting.

loeber: This is both (1) not necessarily true -- there's no first-principles reason why being powerful implies being unethical -- and (2) deeply pessimistic and defeatist. You can apply whataboutism and say that everyone's equally bad, but I assure you that there's a pretty big difference, even down to your quality life, between the types of systems you choose to participate in.

observationist: It doesn't matter what you know so much as who you know. Networking is the most precious currency. He met the right people, got the right guests, and surfed a wave of fortunate occurrences. He was roommates with Dylan Patel of TheIjnformation, and John Y of Asionometry, and has since developed a wide range of high level industry contacts.Sometimes people succeed without earning it, and what matters is what they do with the success afterwards. I'd say Dwarkesh earned it, but got lucky and caught the right waves, and has surfed the hell out of his success. He's had consistently well informed, level headed takes, and has engaged the field with insight and honest curiousity.When I see people surf like that, I applaud it. There's nothing grifty or shady, he's just had a great series of excellent opportunities and has played them for everything they're worth. Once he had a few billionaires on, that was all the social cache he needed to continue attracting guests and high level researchers and other figures in AI.

abcde666777: "Within 20 years 99% of the military will be AIs" That smells like such a baseless speculation that from the get go I'm not convinced of the author's rigor.

x0x0: It's just... immensely self-aggrandizing nonsense. The subhed> “Preface to the highest stakes negotiations in history.”Like come on. The cuban missile crisis, for starters? Bro needs to calm tf down.

empath75: It’s also just a category error. It’s like saying that 99% of farm workers are tractors or 99% of textile workers are looms.

JumpCrisscross: > Is there actually a benefit? Or are we just watching the slow motion collapse of another empire convinced of its own immortality?These aren’t mutually exclusive. The world is better off for Athens and the Roman and Harrapan and Haudenosaunee republics. (Book request: history of the republic. I’ve struggled to find one.)The CCP with internal elections was interesting and a genuine riposte to broadly-enfranchised republics. Xi as a dictator is not, not.

BoredPositron: But we are not talking about china.

alecco: I might be old, but he strikes me as a shallow valley Bro. His CV has nothing of significance. But he had a lot of Big Tech guests and even that Navy intelligence woman. He got a boost by being endorsed by Bezos. It smells of BS to me. Again, maybe I'm just a grumpy greybeard and this is a Gen Z thing.

observationist: I'm also a grumpy greybeard - but I've got nothing but respect for him grinding out some good podcasts and then being in the right place and right time to capitalize on connections. I see a lot of skepticism directed his way, but I view it as a lot like early dotcom winners. Catch the right wave and it's like winning the lottery, success far beyond what you'd normally be able to reach, and then you get the opportunity to show whether you can keep it or not. I appreciate a good success story, and it's awesome to see people win by catching a wave, and then hold on to it, showing that they can keep doing it at a higher level.

telotortium: One thing I’ve never heard a good answer to: If Anthropic is a supplier not to the Department of Defense itself, but to Palantir, why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation (assuming the government’s concerns with Anthropic having authority over military missions is valid)?As for whether code written with Claude Code should be so considered - if it’s just code that is subject to human review, I would argue that this use shouldn’t be a supply chain risk. But with Claude Code PR Review and similar products, the chance that an AI product (not limiting to Anthropic here) could own a load-bearing part of the lifecycle of a critical piece of code becomes much larger, and deserves scrutiny.

HarHarVeryFunny: I'm not sure that "supply chain risk" is even the right term to be discussing.What Hegseth/Trump want to do is not just stop Anthropic models from being used by any military supplier pursuant to any military operation, but rather say that if you do business with the military then you must not use Anthropic at all, even if that usage is entirely unrelated to whatever goods/services you are providing to the military.

kelnos: It's not pessimistic or defeatist; you first have to recognize the limitations and failure modes of your system before you can think about changing it.Is it possible to live in a world where powerful entities have gotten there through ethical means? Sure. We don't live in that world, though.And yes, if I said "name me one powerful person/entity that got there through ethical means", I'm sure you could give me a name. But that name would surely be an outlier.

ang_cire: > There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.The American 'experiment' is one long history of the US doing really horrible things, but giving ourselves a pass because we dress it up in the name of freedom and self-determination.If you ignore our slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, it's easy to paint China's slavery and genocide as evils that are unique somehow.The real experiment of America is in seeing how self-deluded we can become if we continuously reinforce the false premise that our institutions are intrinsically good (or at least, nebulously "better").

plaidthunder: You're not wrong that terrible things have been done in the USA and that terrible things continue to happen.> giving ourselves a pass because we dress it up in the name of freedom and self-determination.> The real experiment of America is in seeing how self-deluded we can become if we continuously reinforce the false premise that our institutions are intrinsically goodThese narratives are self-defeating. The public equivalent of a private bitter resignation that life is hopeless and pointless.You're here on a website owned and operated by American business interests acknowledging American atrocities openly.Members of the US government regularly do the same.Embarrassing periods of American history are sometimes taught in a stilted way, but just as often are taught fairly and accurately (depends on the state).There are powerful actors who would like there to be an official narrative of American greatness or who a "real American" is that you aren't allowed to criticize.Ironically, a narrative like that would make America just like most other countries in history.For all of the evil things it's participated in and perpetrated, America does seem exceptional in its capacity for self-reflection.It's a capacity that is under attack and should be protected.As a vulgar sort of experiment, go ask Qwen3.5 about Tiananmen Square then ask ChatGPT about Japanese internment during WWII.

elAhmo: Great take. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the US can’t really be seen as the “good guys” in such a simple way. Many of these things have been happening for years, but war crimes, disregard for international law, blackmailing allies, killing their own citizens without accountability, and allowing foreign governments to heavily influence policy are all troubling signs.It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get. That alone says a lot about the current state of things.

possibleworlds: > If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the US can’t really be seen as the “good guys” in such a simple way.More like the past 200 years. America have never been the "good guys", and it is only Americans who seem to think they ever were.

cuuupid: If a majority of the Americans believed America was not generally the "good guys" it would be a sign of a failed democracy.Similarly normal for the population of any country that has net negative externalities from America to view them as the "bad guys".The current and growing anti-US sentiment is an expected result of an increasing gap between the US and the rest of the first world on economy and defense. The existence of a superpower is precluded on being viewed negatively by the rest of the world

kelnos: I know people IRL that are so fed up with the US's bullshit that they do sometimes look at China and think their dominance might be better for the world. "Well, when's the last time China started a war or even deployed military forces in another country?", they ask... and I don't know how to respond to that (because they haven't, for at least 30 years that I can think of). And saying something like "well, they've been expanding their territory through extralegal means, and use coercion and grey-area tactics to get what they want" feels like an unsatisfying retort.

margalabargala: You quoted the article:> The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race?Right now there are two contenders for first in the AI race. The US, and China.You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.You can say "oh wouldn't it be nice if Europe won instead" but they don't have anything in the race right now. We're stuck with the US or China.

ang_cire: > You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.This is you putting words in my mouth. It's bad if either wins.You seem to be operating under an unspoken personal belief that an AI race "win" inevitably spills out into global dominance.I don't know that it won't, but you likewise don't know that it will, and I'm not beholden to debate things from your chosen premise.I think AI will be bad for whoever is being targeted by it's controllers, but I don't think it will intrinsically disrupt the military spheres that exist now as a result of nuclear weaponry.China will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.The US will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.Imho, the idea of an AI arms race "winner" is just the new face of the securitization rhetoric that we used to justify our military excursionism during the Cold War.

_diyar: How so? I enjoyed them, keeping in mind that the lecturer was a professor at a US naval war college.

alecco: Would you like to know MORE?