Dwarkesh Podcast
AMA ft. Sholto & Trenton: New Book, Career Advice Given AGI, How I'd Start From Scratch
25 Mar 2025
I recorded an AMA! I had a blast chatting with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. We discussed my new book, career advice given AGI, how I pick guests, how I research for the show, and some other nonsense.My book, “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025” is available in digital format now. Preorders for the print version are also open!Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Timestamps(0:00:00) - Book launch announcement(0:04:57) - AI models not making connections across fields(0:10:52) - Career advice given AGI(0:15:20) - Guest selection criteria(0:17:19) - Choosing to pursue the podcast long-term(0:25:12) - Reading habits(0:31:10) - Beard deepdive(0:33:02) - Who is best suited for running an AI lab?(0:35:16) - Preparing for fast AGI timelines(0:40:50) - Growing the podcast Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, this is going to be an Ask Me Anything episode. I'm joined with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. You guys do some AI stuff, right? Yeah, dabble. They're researchers at Anthropic. Other news, I have a book launching today. It's called A Scaling Era. I hope one of the questions ends up being why you should buy this book. But we can come to words with one stone.
Okay, let's just get at it. What's the first question that we got to answer? Take us away.
So I want to ask the flyball question that I heard before of why should ordinary people care about this book? Like, why should my mom buy and read the book?
Yeah. First, let me tell you about the book, what it is. So, you know, these last few years I've been interviewing AI lab CEOs, researchers, people like you guys, obviously, but also scholars from all kinds of different fields, economists, philosophers, and researchers.
They've been addressing, I think, what are basically the gnarliest, most interesting, most important questions we've ever had to ask ourselves. Like, what is the fundamental nature of intelligence? What will happen when we have billions of extra workers? How do we model out the economics of that? How do we think about an intelligence that is greater than the rest of humanity combined?
Is that even a coherent concept? And so what I'm super delighted with is that with Stripe Press, we made this book where we compiled and curated the best, most insightful snippets across all these interviews. And you can read Dario addressing why does scaling work?
And then on the next page is Demis explaining DeepMind's plans for whether they're going to go with the RL route and how much of the AlphaZero stuff will play into the next generation of And on the next page is, of course, you guys going through the technical details of how these models work. And then there's so many different fields that are implicated.
I mean, I feel like AI is one of the most multidisciplinary fields that one can imagine because there's no field, no domain of human knowledge that is not relevant to understanding what a future society of different kinds of beings will look like. You can have Carl Schulman talk about how the scaling hypothesis shows up in primate brain scaling from chimpanzees to humans.
On the next page might be an economist trying to argue with like Tyler Cowen explaining why he doesn't expect explosive economic growth and why the bottlenecks will eat all that up. Anyways, so that's why your mom should buy this book. It's just like it is the distillation of all these different fields of human knowledge applied to the most important questions that humanity is facing right now.
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