Dwarkesh Patel

New blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do. Reiner is CEO of MatX , a…

I had an interesting discussion recently. Someone asked me, what is intelligence? I said, the ability to achieve your goals across a wide range of domains. Okay, he says, then by that definition isn’t Donald Trump…

Wrote up some flashcards here to help myself retain all the stuff below . On why pretraining runs fails Had an interesting chat with someone on why pretraining runs often fail. It was very interesting to get a sense of…

I’m writing up some threads that we explored in my interview with Michael Nielson . That episode was one of my favorites. The organizing question from my interview with Michael Nielson was, “How do we…

Eric Jang walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools. Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward. AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of…

David Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the…

Did a very different format with Reiner Pope - a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served. It’s shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a…

More open questions I put out a blog prize to answer a couple of big questions I have about AI. The goal is really to find someone to hire as coresearcher. I have more questions of this variety, but I omitted them from…

There has never been a time where excellent intellectual output on the right question has been more valuable or more urgent. Compelling answers can inform the most important economic and foreign policy decisions that…