Dwarkesh Patel

What has changed that has allowed NVIDIA to go from Hopper was 8, then Blackwell is 72, and now...

the cost of figuring out which cable hops to which, or like which signal.

Excuse me, I have a question.

But if you look at a physical data center,

Seems like there's a lot of space within a rack.

I don't know, just like the cables are like really big.

It's literally the physical space to put a cable that's constraining it.

I had no idea.

Interesting.

That seems surprising.

The rack is so big, and we can't just stuff more cables in there.

Deep work is by its nature quite aversive.

So even things which seem like work, like Slack and email, can be easy ways to distract yourself.

So I often wish that I could just turn the internet off.

But if I'm prepping for an interview, even if I have the papers and books on hand, it's still super useful to be able to do a back and forth on the LLM so I can break down concepts and research follow ups.

Google's new Gemma 4 is the first open model that allows me to have this kind of fully disconnected focus machine.

It's small enough to run on my laptop, but good enough to actually be useful.

So to prep for this episode, I downloaded Reiner's scaling book and shut off the internet.

I was able to have Gemma help me understand the material and answer my questions.

If you want an LLM that you can run locally on your laptop or even your phone, you should check out Gemma 4.