Dwarkesh Patel (@dwarkesh_sp)

Had a lot of fun chatting again with my twin brother @dylan522p We went through lab economics over the next few years - the shift from inference to training as RSI draws near; and how Anthropic and OpenAI are on track to control most of the world’s usable FLOPs within the next few years (because they can monetize compute better and thus outbid everyone). And then we discuss whether the >$10T of total AI capex we’ll see by the end of the decade will cause a sovereign debt crisis, where hyperscaler debt raises interest rates, drives non-AI exposed countries into bankruptcy, and crashes non-AI equities. One question we weren’t able to resolve is whether there’s anything that can counter all the forces barrelling towards centralization in this industry - the economies of scale in training, the scarcity of compute, and eventually continual learning and RSI. 0:00:00 – Two labs will soon control most of the world’s compute 0:07:01 – $6 billion in fab capex enables $1t+ of end revenue 0:13:08 – Compute prices will rise if the labs outbid everyone 0:18:22 – Which layer will capture most of the surplus? 0:25:40 – Will datacenter regulation slow down AI? 0:29:43 – Labs are shifting compute from inference to R&D 0:33:27 – China gets less than 10% of new compute, but its labs need less 0:48:48 – Will AI cause a sovereign debt crisis? 1:07:52 – Will the world's future workforce belong to a few companies?

OpenAI HR told Leopold that a major reason for his firing was the memo he'd sent the board warning how broken OAI's security was. What happened next makes me even prouder to call him a friend. People may have forgotten, but up until 2024, OpenAI had this secret non-disparagement clause in their off-boarding agreement. If you didn’t sign it, they'd clawback all your equity. As far as I'm aware, there were only two people ever who didn’t sign it - @DKokotajlo, and Leopold Aschenbrenner. Of all the researchers who left OpenAI before 2024, who had far more to fall back on, Leopold, all of 22 years old, was one of the only ones willing to refuse the golden handcuffs, and say, "I want to preserve my right to talk about safety and security at OAI.” We have a lot of disagreements, but he's among the most principled and resilient people I know.

Adam Brown (@A_G_I_Joe) is back! General relativity is said to be the most beautiful idea the human mind has ever produced. Most of us will never get to fully appreciate its elegance by taking the 20-lecture graduate course Adam taught on it at Stanford. But in the video below, Adam distills the key idea at its heart so clearly and compellingly that even I could keep up lol. At the core of general relativity, Einstein is trying to figure out the principle behind a particular coincidence: that the mass that resists acceleration and the mass that gravity pulls on just happen to be exactly the same. Adam then leads us through the path of insight which Einstein called his “happiest thought.” Then Adam lectures on black holes. First, by showing how even under special relativity you could create a perpetual motion machine if black holes weren't truly black. And then, by explaining why the observations of an infalling observer and a distant bystander to the black hole would be so radically different Adam leads Blueshift, the team at Google DeepMind cracking science and reasoning. Which gave us the opportunity to discuss at the very end how close we are to AIs that could rediscover general relativity from scratch. Stay till the close for some philosophy of science. 0:00:00 – The coincidence that led Einstein to general relativity 0:16:42 – Gravity is a consequence of curved spacetime, not a force 0:31:46 – Why black holes prevent unlimited energy extraction 0:47:12 – Black holes are the ultimate power plants 1:13:50 – What falling into a black hole would actually feel like 1:18:51 – The three ways we know black holes are real 1:24:21 – The first time we saw gravity bend light 1:29:33 – How far can AI get without experimental evidence? Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube/Spotify to watch. Enjoy!