Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive.In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed.After the episode, I convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he's up to. Please go here to contribute.Read the full transcript here.Sponsors:* Jane Street is looking to hire their next generation of leaders. Their deep learning team is looking for ML researchers, FPGA programmers, and CUDA programmers. Summer internships are open - if you want to stand out, take a crack at their new Kaggle competition. To learn more, go to janestreet.com/dwarkesh.* Turing provides complete post-training services for leading AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Gemini. They specialize in model evaluation, SFT, RLHF, and DPO to enhance models’ reasoning, coding, and multimodal capabilities. Learn more at turing.com/dwarkesh.* This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page.Timestamps00:00:00 - Anonymity00:01:09 - Automating Steve Jobs00:04:38 - Isaac Newton's theory of progress00:06:36 - Grand theory of intelligence00:10:39 - Seeing scaling early00:21:04 - AGI Timelines00:22:54 - What to do in remaining 3 years until AGI00:26:29 - Influencing the shoggoth with writing00:30:50 - Human vs artificial intelligence00:33:52 - Rabbit holes00:38:48 - Hearing impairment00:43:00 - Wikipedia editing00:47:43 - Gwern.net00:50:20 - Counterfactual careers00:54:30 - Borges & literature01:01:32 - Gwern's intelligence and process01:11:03 - A day in the life of Gwern01:19:16 - Gwern's finances01:25:05 - The diversity of AI minds01:27:24 - GLP drugs and obesity01:31:08 - Drug experimentation01:33:40 - Parasocial relationships01:35:23 - Open rabbit holes Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, I'm interviewing Gwern Branwen. Gwern is an anonymous internet researcher and writer. He's deeply influenced the people who are building AGI. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive. We recorded this conversation in person.
In order to protect Guern's anonymity, we created this avatar. This isn't his voice. This isn't his face. But these are his words. Guern, what is the most underrated benefit of anonymity?
I think the most underrated benefit of anonymity is that people don't project onto you as much. They kind of can't like slot you into any particular niche or identity and like end up writing you off in advance. Everyone has to read you at least a little bit to even begin to dismiss you. It's great that people can't retaliate against you.
And I've derived a lot of benefit from people not being able to, like, mail heroin to my home and call the police to swap me. But I always feel that the biggest benefit is just that you get a hearing at all, basically. You don't get immediately written off by the context.
Do you expect companies to get automated top-down starting with the CEO or from the bottom up starting with the workers?
All the pressures, I think, are to go bottom up. And from existing things, it's just much more palatable in every way to start at the bottom and replace there and then work your way up to eventually kind of just having human executives overseeing a firm of AIs.
And also from an RL perspective, I think if we are in fact better than AIs in some way, it should be in the long-term vision thing, right? Like the AIs will be too myopic to execute any kind of novel long-term strategy and seize new opportunities.
So that would presumably give you this paradigm where you have like a human CEO who does the vision thing and then the AI corporation kind of like scurries around underneath them doing the CEO's bidding and they don't have the taste that the CEO has.
So you have one kind of Steve Jobs figure at the helm and then maybe a whole pyramid of AIs out there executing the vision and bringing him new proposals. And he, you know, he looks at every individual thing and says, no, like that proposal is bad. This one is good.
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